Ground Rules

As I said in my first post, you should know everything about me, my thought process, and the means I employ to make sense of the insensible. If we're going to examine the life of Jesus as recorded in the New Testament a little more closely, through the lens of Apocrypha, history, tradition, whatever sheds light on the subject, then you need to understand my ground rules.

To that end, for reference, here are some of the time-tested pieces of knowledge and methodology I apply to solve things. Like everything else on this blog, it's a little tongue-in-cheek. If you'd like explanations for any of these, please do feel free to ask in the comments, and I'll do my best to respond in a timely fashion.

1. Occam's Razor before anything else. (Put another way, in a similar spirit but not the exact meaning, if you hear hoof-beats, think horses, not zebras. Or, if you like, the star-shaped block usually goes into the star-shaped hole, so start with it and see how the puzzle fits together.)

2. For every piece of information, be mindful of who's telling you it, and why. Everyone lies. Not everyone lies maliciously, but everyone lies.

3. We are working with an unreliable record, period, so every piece of context helps, especially from a perspective as close as possible to that of the historical Jesus himself.
   

Rule No. 3 is especially important. As Canon Martyn Percy, quoted in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, once put it, "The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven." This is always worth bearing in mind when dealing with the text, and with the New Testament in particular.

Firstly, the Gospels were not written by the apostles acting as reporters. They were written years after Jesus' death by anonymous people later called Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as a matter of convenience. The contents were rewritten, translated and re-translated, and voted on at different times and for a variety of reasons.

Secondly, the Church was involved in a battle to rewrite the "facts" of Jesus' life practically from the beginning, and the ancient documents themselves bear this out. The first scribes to copy the books we have got those books from earlier scribes, who got them from earlier scribes. Well before Xerox, they were literally copying copies of copies. Mistakes were bound to creep in. For example, let's say a later scribe couldn't read the handwriting of an earlier scribe. What'll he do? The only thing he can do -- interpret what he thinks the letters are. And, much like deciphering a doctor's handwritten prescription in the days before computers, some scribes were very good at it and some were absolutely dreadful. 

Before you dismiss this possibility as just conjecture, be aware that there is documented proof of later editors disagreeing with former scribes. The fourth-century Codex Vaticanus has a marginal note from one corrector exasperated by an alteration he'd found: "Fool and knave! Leave the old reading, don't change it!" 

By the second century, there was a considerable variety of New Testament texts and the manuscripts closest to the original Gospels are the most variable and amateurish. You don't get what scholars might call "professional, standardized copies" until the fourth or fifth century, by which point comparison to the earlier manuscripts shows they'd become very different books:

• Twelve or thirteen verses were added to the ending of Mark (that Church historians knew of, but also said were absent from almost all Greek manuscripts they'd seen).
• An entire chapter was added to John.
• Two dramatically different versions of Matthew existed.
• Many individual verses or parables were either inserted or deleted; in one case in Luke, the first of nine correctors marked a verse as "spurious," but by the time a third corrector was working on the codex, his words had been scratched out.

And all that's just for starters. The Bible as we know it is far from the last word on Jesus. Gospel-challenging manuscripts like the Dead Sea Scrolls have popped up throughout history, and the relentless increase in human knowledge has included relentless scrutiny of the Bible. Historians, linguists, archaeologists, even the clergy, explore and critique and explain the Bible routinely. I almost believe that the problem for traditional believers is not that scientists don't understand the origins of the Bible, but that scientists understand it so thoroughly.

 

Bear these rules in mind, check out the Bibliography, and then we'll make some discoveries -- or at least pose some theories -- of our own. Can't get to the bottom if you're not digging!