Excellent video. The accounts of the Nativity date from the first century. It would be very strange for people to make up accounts when there were still people alive who had known Jesus. Saint Ignatius, the third bishop of Antioch, and a disciple of the Apostle John, writes of the virgin birth in 103. Saint Matthew and Saint Luke who wrote the Nativity accounts had ample opportunity to speak with Mary and with people who had known her. None of the early Church Fathers cast any doubt on the Nativity accounts.
That makes you wonder about my son’s latest class on Classical Mythology. In that, the Bible is now taught as pure myth and fiction. Apparently a theory gaining ground is that the New Testament was written much later than traditionally believed, with many books and letters written as late as the 2nd Century. They made up many of the characters, many of the Apostles and others, just as they made up Jesus. And on the surface, that might work, as long as you don’t think it through. But that’s something both my sons who have gone to college say – it’s as if they actually don’t want you to delve, to unpack and look at the details. That is, they don’t want you to think things through. If you don’t, then the things they say make perfect sense.
That makes you wonder about my son’s latest class on Classical Mythology. In that, the Bible is now taught as pure myth and fiction. Apparently a theory gaining ground is that the New Testament was written much later than traditionally believed, with many books and letters written as late as the 2nd Century.
See Carsten Thiede’s work in papyrology.
Apparently a theory gaining ground is that the New Testament was written much later than traditionally believed, with many books and letters written as late as the 2nd Century.
Wow, that’s impressive! It was written after the first copies we’ve got! (Some five years ago they got a fragment of, IIRC, Mark’s, that couldn’t be wiggled beyond the first century based on the evidence.)
… More seriously, that’s a rather old theory, I think from about the same time as Crowley’s fad. It deals poorly with the vast amount of information we now have, very easily available.
Digression, I wouldn’t mind a college class that looked at something like Stories of Civilizations– and tried to get folks to have a grasp of, say, how the Greeks viewed Greek mythology, then again for the major strands of Islam, the Jews and Christians. That would be a really useful chunk of information, assuming you did a good job of it, maybe run it past members of the group to say “Yes, this is an accurate statement of What We Believe.” Heck, you’d probably be able to get groups to DONATE summaries of What We Believe for the class.
Pretty much pie in the sky daydreaming, there, though– they can’t even get Greek and Roman mythology right most of the time, and the hate-on for Christianity is just painful.
“A man who disbelieved the Christian story as fact but continually fed on it as myth would, perhaps, be more spiritually alive than one who assented and did not think much about it. The modernist ‐ the extreme modernist, infidel in all but name ‐ need not be called a fool or hypocrite because he obstinately retains, even in the midst of his intellectual atheism, the language, rites, sacraments, and story of the Christians. The poor man may be clinging (with a wisdom he himself by no means understands) to that which is his life. …
Those who do not know that this great myth became fact when the Virgin conceived are, indeed, to be pitied. But Christians also need to be reminded – we may thank Corineus for reminding us – that what became fact was a myth, that it carries with it into the world of fact all the properties of a myth. God is more than a god, not less; Christ is more than Balder, not less. We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about ‘parallels’ and ‘pagan Christs’: they ought to be there ‐ it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t. We must not, in false spirituality, withhold our imaginative welcome. If God chooses to be mythopoeic ‐ and is not the sky itself a myth ‐ shall we refuse to be mythopathic? For this is the marriage of heaven and earth: perfect myth and perfect fact: claiming not only our love and our obedience, but also our wonder and delight, addressed to the savage, the child, and the poet in each one of us no less than to the moralist, the scholar, and the philosopher.”
— C.S. Lewis – “Myth Became Fact”
Quotermeister, unfortunately I get the strong impression that the point of my son’s class was that what we believed to be fact was, at the end of the day, mere myth. No Jesus. No Mary. No Wise Men. Nothing. No more than there were minotaurs or medusas. Or Luke Skywalkers for that matter.
“In modern scholarship, the Christ myth theory is a fringe theory, which finds virtually no support from scholars, to the point of being addressed in footnotes or almost completely ignored due to the obvious weaknesses they espouse. Common criticisms against the Christ myth theory include: general lack of expertise or relationship to academic institutions and current scholarship; reliance on arguments from silence, dismissal of what sources actually state, and superficial comparisons with mythologies.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_myth_theory#Scholarly_reception
Jesus as never existing at all certainly was a fringe belief, most of what I was told years ago in college being the mythologizing of the historical Jesus. But then again, not too long ago we took for granted that boys and girls objectively existed as well. So things could be moving quickly on many fronts, not just those dealing with gender. .
For those who are interested Dr. Brant Pitre has a presentation titled “The Origin of the Bible: Human Invention or Divine Intervention?” for sale at Catholic Productions. If you want to get a good summary of the presentation there is a free PDF outline available for download at the Catholic Productions website. Just go to the presentation on the website. Near the bottom of the web-page there is a tab titled Excerpt & Outline where you can download it. His outline says that the dating was within 20-50 years after the Crucifixion for the four Gospels. He said that there were many false and heretical writings in circulation. He places them from 2nd to the 6th centuries A.D. He also covers the so-called “Lost Gospels.”
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I wonder if the later dating of the New Testament is an attempt to try to push the date closer to the false and heretical writings to enhance their credibility? I have taken many Catholic Bible studies. One benefit is that the presenters can fill in the cultural context in which the books were written and make the connections between the Old and New Testaments. Too many modernist presentations tear the Bible raw and bleeding out of its cultural context.
GREGB, I might buy that for my son. Not that he was swayed by anything. I was more taken by the theory of a late authorship for the NT. I first ran across that back in the early 00s. Like Foxfier says, that has to be a qualified theory since we have scraps of NT dating pretty early. That the whole of the Bible was presented as mere myth was less surprising. It was a mythology class after all, not a history class. And nowadays, rules seem pretty fast and loose when it comes to advancing whatever theories are desired. That’s something my sons noticed.