mardi 20 septembre 2022
Beginning on Henke2022az? Nope.
What Henke Responded - up to "Henke2022aa" (with ab and ai looked up in advance, since referred to in previous) · Ah, Some New · Back to Philosophy · Beginning on Henke2022az? Nope.
I already used Henke2022az as PS to the Ah, Some New. So, Henke2022ba it is. With Henke2022bh.
Here, Lundahl (2022k) again invokes his worthless “first audience” charade, which is refuted in Henke (2022b), Henke (2022bh) and elsewhere in this debate.
Henke2022b was already refuted in my last turn before Henke's, in my previous turn. Let's see if bh (yes, I jump forward) has some new to say.
Henke (2022bh): “Lundahl 2022k – More Nonsense Involving the ‘Earliest Known Audience’”
Mr. Lundahl makes a totally unwarranted assumption that if the earliest known audience believed that Genesis 3 or another claim in an ancient text was historically true, then the claims must be true.
Never ever said that. My claim is that if the earliest known audience believed a text to be historic, it means the text is not a piece of fiction. Do you get the difference? A historic text may be untrue at some information or even the main one. But that narrows down to lies and misunderstandings. A fictional text is by definition untrue as to fact and meant to be taken so.
Here are the reasons why, either my real claim, or his misconstruction of the claim, is, according to him, nonsense. With my answers.
1. People lie and make up stories.
Those two are very different. Lying involves making up a story, or rather a salient part of it, but making up a story is not automatically lying.
A liar, unlike a poet of fiction, wants to be believed, as to prosaic actual fact. In order to achieve this, he has to calculate what he is likely to get away with.
Those who don't see the difference are horrible art critics : they criticise sci-fi or fantasy for "it's so fake" (just because the setting isn't mundane, it would be something else if the reason for the comment were bad psychology or psychology mismatched with the facts about the character (I saw some Tolkien fans do that criticism with the Galadriel of Episode 3)). In fact, the fiction writer is not trying to convince people that things happened. He's trying to make them experience it as if it happened, that's another thing, but he's not trying to elicit the judgement after reading or watching that it is a fact. This gives him much more freedom, he doesn't need to consider what he "can get away with" but only with what he can paint in words.
Now, the whole point is, the liar who does get belief is limited to "what he can get away with" - if someone wants to argue early chapters of Genesis are a fraud, he needs to explain how it was successful. One line would be - as for book of Mormon or as for Silmarillion, if it had been seriously put forth as lost and recovered history, like the book of Mormon was, that at one point Genesis' early chapters were "lost and recovered history" - a status excellently suited for introducing frauds or passing off fiction as fact, unless the content actually contradicts something which already is a basic belief of some member of the audience. A Catholic would not believe the Book of Mormon if attending to the fact that the Church according to Matthew 28:16-20 needs to be present on earth from Ascension to Harmageddon. An Atheist would not believe the Book of Mormon if it contained miracles, and would usually also not believe it because it referred to a people as a holy people of Christians, a category to which he gives no special status (in theory).
That is why it is important that:
· a) we find no particular point at which early chapters of Genesis was "lost and recovered history" rather than "history" to the earliest known audience;
· b) we find bridges from those early chapters up to Christ all over the Old Testament (least detailed in the time between Daniel and Maccabees);
· c) we do not find Mormons changing the status of Book of Mormon from "lost and recovered history" to "history."
But if Henke wants to word it as "Mormons sucked at distinguishing history from fiction" he is simply misstating the very real case against Book of Mormon.
And he's forgetting that it never ever had the status of Spiderman or Rapunzel among Mormons. Or of simple normal transmission.
2. People misinterpret natural events and sometimes credit them to supernatural forces (e.g., volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, severe storms, draught).
Such cases are occasions when historicity of text does not get a full match from factuality of detail.
For instance, Hercules, Theseus and Romulus being sons of Jove, Neptune and Mars is to my mind very clearly a false induction from superhuman strength (for the first two, like for Samson and Beowulf). Or from other extraordinary achievements (for the third). But the falsehood of that assumption doesn't invalidate the general historicity of the text.
So, very far from refuting my actual point, Henke is helping me to make it.
3. The history of Mormonism, Scientology, etc. demonstrate that lies can become accepted by thousands or even millions of gullible people in a short amount of time, perhaps in no more than decades or a century.
The lies they believe are not about their own history. They get the stories of Joseph Smith and Ron Hubbard right.
Scientology involves no statements about history, as far as I know. Or knew, see addition below.
In Mormonism, the statements about history are in the category "lost and recovered history" - much like pre-history. The category as such is ideal for how a fraud or an honest misunderstanding can be perpetrated.
4. Even if ancient historians (such as the five ancient biographers of Alexander the Great, Section 6.0) were sincere and honest, they still may have included inaccurate information, false rumors and misinterpretations in their works.
The objection would be against the parodic strawman.
I will not believe Julius Caesar's biology of elks. He never saw one and some Germanic warrior made fun of him. Or of some Gaul who passed the misinfirmation on.
But I will believe that Julius Caesar fought Germanic warriors and got informations about Germanic conditions.
Inaccurate informations does not mean the text as a whole is fiction.
5. We don’t know who wrote Genesis 3 and when it was written.
We don't see the first audience directly, hence the importance of a later first known audience.
Part of the objection is however a fairly recent fad of imagining Jews in exile copied Babylonic myths and then put their own twist on them.
6. The Dead Sea scrolls have the oldest known fragments of Genesis. This was about 1,000 years after Moses supposedly wrote the book. So, how could the writers of the Dead Sea scrolls have reliably known anything about events that occurred perhaps a thousand or more years earlier? How does Mr. Lundahl know that Genesis 3 is not a fabrication that may have been additionally altered or rewritten long before the Dead Sea scrolls? Why should anyone trust the claims in Genesis? Lundahl (2022c) assumes that God would have protected Genesis from corruption, but this assumption is totally without merit.
It so happens, I gave some natural means against total corruption, which would work without God's interference. I only added God as - to us faithful, somewhat irrelevant in the debate with an unbeliever except answering a direct question - a guarantee against any corruption touching all extant versions of the text. But I gave natural means for the text to remain uncorrupt.
The burden of proof is on the one presuming it's a fabrication. Yeah, this classicist used an English translation of "onus probandi" ...
The great distance between Moses and Dead Sea scrolls is not even 150 % of the distance between Julius Caesar actually writing 7 books out of 8 and our earliest manuscript of Bellum Gallicum.
How do I know their attribution is correct? Well, earliest known audience, as with genre. As far as I know Mormons are not generally attributing informations from Book of Mormon to Gibbon or Mommsen. I don't know even one Mormon guilty of such misattribution.
The onus probandi is on the one claiming an author different from the traditionally assigned one. Wellhausen understood that, that's why he actually argued against Moses being the author of the Pentateuch, but his arguments are wrong. If Henke will try to argue Wellhausen, let him do so. General scepticism won't wash.
7. The biology of snakes is incompatible with them talking and there’s no evidence of either a supernatural or biological Talking Snake ever existing.
A very good argument for the Christian interpretation of Genesis 3 : a) the Devil took visible form in the shape of a snake or, b) the Devil controlled sounds coming from the snake, like a good angel controlled sounds coming from the donkey of Balaam. In other words, this makes the comment of Bishop Challoner very relevant.
You could of course counter by stating "angels don't exist" - which will inevitably lead to Genesis 3 (not just for talking snakes, but also for Cherubs with firey swords) not being accurately reported history and this would leave it with a probability of not originating as history at all. This would be a kind of proof against Genesis 3 being history. But Henke claimed to be an agnostic, and as such he cannot take this road. That's why he is trying to shift the burden of proof - stating that a text taken as history could have originated as a totally different genre.
8. As further discussed in Section 5.0 and Henke (2022a), Hypotheses #3 and #4 on the origin of the Genesis 3 Talking Snake are rational, but Hypotheses #1 and #2 are not.
Here I will requote his four hypotheses:
1. The Talking Snake existed and the account in Genesis 3 was accurately passed down by Adam to Moses. Moses then wrote it down in Genesis. There would have been no human eyewitnesses for most of the events in Genesis 1-2:14. If Genesis 1-2:14 is history, God would have to have given the information in these verses as visions.
2. Moses saw Genesis 1-3 and perhaps most or even all of everything else in Genesis through visions given by God. There didn’t need to be a continuous human transmission of information from Adam to Moses. Visions from God would not be open to errors unlike written or oral transmissions from Adam to Moses.
3. The Talking Snake of Genesis 3 was part of a made-up campfire story, a parable or based on a pagan myth that eventually was taken as fact by the ancient Israelites, like how President Reagan and his fans mistook fictional stories from World War 2 as real. William Tell (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/in-search-of-william-tell-2198511/ ) and a number of Roman Catholic saints (https://listverse.com/2014/05/17/10-beloved-saints-with-fictitious-biographies/ ) are probably also myths. Of course, in the United States, pro-abortionists regularly use fictional TV shows to convince Americans that abortion is a good thing. Even though they are fiction, many people believe the propaganda. Right now, a lot of Russians are believing the fictional propaganda their government is inventing about Ukraine. People also often pick and choose parts of fictional stories that they want to believe and ignore the rest, such as individuals believing in the existence of “The Force” from the Star Wars movies, while recognizing that the rest of the movies are fiction. A lot of people are gullible and believe fictions are real.
4. “Prophets” or others claimed to have visions from God about events that supposedly happened thousands of years earlier. These visions were delusions or outright lies, but a lot of people came to believe them. Joseph Smith also did this and Kat Kerr continues with this nonsense in the US.
Henke has given no reason to take any of hypotheses 2, 3 or 4 as rational, except by mistaking a general negativity against the supernatural (scepticism is too dignified a word) for rationality. The examples given for his hypothesis 3 have been refuted here: Excursus on William Tell and Catholic Saints
He has also given no reason to discard hypothesis 1, since he consistently misconstrues how important for history first known audience actually is.
9. Mr. Lundahl has the burden of evidence to demonstrate that the claims in Genesis 3 and elsewhere in the Bible are factual.
My way is double:
1) establish - by first known audience - that the text is historic rather than fictional
2) refute any claims Henke may make for its being specifically a fraud perpetrated like this or specifically a misunderstanding which happened like that.
He fails to see what the first claim even means (since he confuses it with "first known audience" being right to trust every fact in the text) and never goes on to what I would have to further refute. So, his incompetence in debating me sticks me to step one of this two-step method.
Mr. Lundahl fails to realize that ancient histories by themselves cannot be trusted
Mr. Henke fails to realie that ancient histories by themselves can be trusted unless there is a specific reason to mistrust them.
especially if they were written centuries or millennia after the supposed event that they are describing
If there are earlier or otherwise more reliable versions, I will tend to prefer them. I still prefer a text written after 1000 years of oral tradition or (between event and Exodus) 3689 years of at least partially oral tradition, over a reconstruction from no text at all.
or if the documents are copies of copies of copies of copies... and not the originals
This is a very fine way to handle juridical documents in recent history, but it is over the top, unrealistic, when it comes to ancient texts.
We do have a discipline that compares text versions, it does very much not favour the general assumption that a text copied and recopied is like plasticine being molded and remolded.
Mr. Henke showed off the kind of very selective scepticism which the exact same "problem" somehow doesn't elicit about Tacitus.
The first 6 books of the Annales survive in a single manuscript, now in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, where it is MS. plut. 68.1. Since this is the library of the Medici prince, Lorenzo the Magnificent, it is naturally called the Codex Mediceus, or M for short.
This MS was written around 850AD in Germany. The distinctive type of script suggests the event took place in the scriptorium of the Benedictine abbey of Fulda, and this is supported by an explicit reference to Tacitus in the Annales Fuldenses for 852 (Cornelius Tacitus, scriptor rerum a Romanis in ea gente gestarum) which seems to show knowledge of Ann. 2,9.
https://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/tacitus/
This account is taken primarily from L.D. REYNOLDS, Texts and Transmission: A survey of the Latin Classics, Clarendon Press, Oxford (1983), ISBN 0-19-814456-3. Tacitus occupies page 406-411. The pages on the major works are by R.J. TARRANT; those on the minor works by M. WINTERBOTTOM. The references are also from this volume, except where indicated, but I have only reproduced a few of them. Anyone at all interested in the transmission of the classics should read this volume. It is in print, and available from Amazon. The only downside is the price - $150 - which will exclude most people.
So, why so little scepticism on what Carrier get's from Tacitus?
Even if an ancient history happens to be an original copy describing an event that occurred at the time that the document was written, unless a claim in an ancient history is confirmed with independent external evidence, either in another manuscript or from archeology, there’s no reason to accept it as reliable history.
If there weren't, the other manuscripts wouldn't add it and archaeology is too easy to reinterpret to be the arbiter of historic fact. Only very few types of claims can actually be checked by archaeology. Hittites were a culture with wide span of influence (deduceable from a Hittite at King David's court) - confirmed by archaeology. Solomon built a temple. Confirmed by recent archaeology. Christ died on a cross on Calvary and lay an a rock grave that was since then emptied - confirmed by the Holy Patroness of archaeologists, St. Helen, the mother of Constantine. But Christ cured a leper - how could archaeology confirm that?
Or this:
John Wilkes Booth was a well-known actor and a Confederate spy from Maryland; though he never joined the Confederate army, he had contacts with the Confederate secret service.[300] After attending an April 11, 1865 speech in which Lincoln promoted voting rights for blacks, Booth hatched a plot to assassinate the President.[301] When Booth learned of the Lincolns' intent to attend a play with General Grant, he planned to assassinate Lincoln and Grant at Ford's Theatre. Lincoln and his wife attended the play Our American Cousin on the evening of April 14, just five days after the Union victory at the Battle of Appomattox Courthouse. At the last minute, Grant decided to go to New Jersey to visit his children instead of attending the play.[302]
On April 14, 1865, hours before he was assassinated, Lincoln signed legislation establishing the United States Secret Service,[303] and, at 10:15 in the evening, Booth entered the back of Lincoln's theater box, crept up from behind, and fired at the back of Lincoln's head, mortally wounding him. Lincoln's guest, Major Henry Rathbone, momentarily grappled with Booth, but Booth stabbed him and escaped.[304] After being attended by Doctor Charles Leale and two other doctors, Lincoln was taken across the street to Petersen House. After remaining in a coma for eight hours, Lincoln died at 7:22 in the morning on April 15.[305][k] Stanton saluted and said, "Now he belongs to the ages."[310][l] Lincoln's body was placed in a flag-wrapped coffin, which was loaded into a hearse and escorted to the White House by Union soldiers.[311] President Johnson was sworn in later that same day.[312]
Two weeks later, Booth, refusing to surrender, was tracked to a farm in Virginia, and was mortally shot by Sergeant Boston Corbett and died on April 26. Secretary of War Stanton had issued orders that Booth be taken alive, so Corbett was initially arrested to be court martialed. After a brief interview, Stanton declared him a patriot and dismissed the charge.[313]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln#Assassination
I am not asking how many of these details are known from contemporary documents in the original - far more than any details from Moses' or Caesar's time, no doubt - but simply : what can archaeology do to confirm these?
Nothing.
I seem I was marginally wrong about Scientology.
Wikipedia main page has a feature, On this day - on September 20 it features :
1967 – L. Ron Hubbard (pictured), the founder of Scientology, announced the story of Xenu in a taped lecture sent to all Scientologists.
Here is what the link to Xenu will reveal:
In Scientology, Xenu (/ˈziːnuː/),[1][2][3] also called Xemu, was the extraterrestrial ruler of the "Galactic Confederacy" who brought billions[4][5] of his people to Earth (then known as "Teegeeack") in DC-8-like spacecraft 75 million years ago, stacked them around volcanoes, and killed them with hydrogen bombs. Official Scientology scriptures hold that the thetans (immortal spirits) of these aliens adhere to humans, causing spiritual harm.[1][6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenu
And it is easier to make a claim on esoteric preservation of history from 75 million years ago, than to make one on normal preservation of history, if at some point historic transmission was tampered with, like Hubbard or Smith did by esoteric or prophetic claims.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Vigil of St. Matthew
20.IX.2022