An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part I

One of the criticisms of the Bible that is tossed about is that there's no proof that any of it happened, or that there's no contemporaneous confirmation of its contents. One of the most attention getting statements that I have read in recent years is there are indeed historical documents regarding the life of Jesus Christ...the four gospels. To those of us with a non-religious orientation that statement sounds ridiculous. Of course they're not historical documents, they're religious texts! The people who wrote them had an agenda! Yes, both of those statements are true, the gospels are religious texts and they were written by people with an agenda. We've all heard the saying "History is written by the victors", which is just a different way of saying that history is written by people with an agenda...always. 

Over the last few years I listened to a few history-themed podcasts - the history of Rome, of Byzantium, of the successive Persian Empires. In each of them I was struck by how often the only information that we have about an event was written decades or generations after the event took place. How there are often gaps in lists of rulers that can only be filled in by speculation. How the only contemporaneous documentation of an era has been long lost and all we have are fragments by historians quoting earlier historians. While there are exceptions, for the most part ancient historians were employed by their rulers to make them look good, or to make the ruler's opponents look bad. Or it was a citizen of the winning side wanting to paint his people in glory. Or maybe it was the losing side trying to depict their people as something other than abject losers. Yes. They had an agenda.  

The writers of the Gospels had an agenda too, which doesn't make them any better or worse than any other writings from that time period. The first of the surviving Gospels, "Mark" was most likely written around 70 C.E., i.e, around 40 years after Jesus' ministry. This gap in time is brought up a lot to disparage the authenticity of the Gospels, but it was not unusual, especially since it is likely Jesus' early followers were illiterate or at least not educated enough to put together a narrative like you see in any of the Gospels. So a written account during or immediately following Jesus' life would not be expected. The utter lack of any originals of the Gospels or even the epistles, or even any copies dating any earlier than hundreds of years after Jesus' life is also cited as problematic, yet you'd be hard pressed to find an original edition of any of the classical writings, or any writings that have as many extant manuscripts as does the Bible. 

 Historians will examine any historical document to determine, not only its authenticity, but to discover any biases that the author had; they also have a number of ways to test the reliability of the claims made in any history, any ancient biography. Unless one is of the opinion that The Bible is the revealed Word of God, inspired by God Himself, it makes sense to subject The Bible to the same scrutiny that any other historical document would be. 

For most people, however, The Bible is an either-or proposition. Either it's God's Word delivered via prophets of God to His people, or it's a book of fables with no truth in it whatsoever. (Of course there are intermediate positions - some believers admit that some passages in The Bible may be metaphorical while some disbelievers accept that there's some decent morals and ethics in it.) 

In this series I take the position that there is good reason to accept that there was an historical Jesus that the New Testament was based upon, but that not only are there contradictions regarding him among the different books, but that Jesus wasn't who most people think he was. I'll be touching on the milieu in which Jesus lived, the Jewish scriptures that he was taught, contradictions between how the Gospels differ from the message of Paul in his epistles, how how it all morphed into "The Church". 

And off we go!

Sports

Despite having removed "being a sports fan" from the lists of things that describe me, I have absolutely no problem with people who are sports fans. Even the "rabid" ones, but I just don't get it any more. (By the way, if you see me wearing my NY Mets cap - I know absolutely nothing about the current version of the team and only wear it as a sign that I am a New Yorker)

There's a lot of things that perplex me about sports fandom. I'll start with New York fandom, since a lot of people in my adopted state of Nebraska think that the fact that I'm not from here explains my disinterest in the local college sports teams, especially the football team.

New York Football Teams: in my view, there's only one New York NFL team, and that's the Buffalo Bills. Both the "New York" Giants and "New York" Jets play their home games in New Jersey, and have for decades. Yet New York football fans happily refer to both teams as New York teams. They're not only out in the suburbs of their eponymous city, as many sports teams are, but in a whole 'nother STATE! It's true that both teams started their existence in New York City, but the Giants have been a New Jersey team since 1976 and the Jets followed soon thereafter. 

Sports vs. Education: I fully understand that professional sports teams, and even popular college teams are good for business. It makes a certain kind of sense for donors to pour their discretionary funds into new stadiums or even for cities to offer big tax breaks rather than funding its educational institutions. Sorts fans spend money. But high school sports? I'm not criticizing the existence of high school sports, but the priority that is often placed on them. When my step-daughter was in high school she participated in several sports. Coaches thought nothing of requiring players to devote many hours to practice or to observing other teams when homework got neglected. Out of town games kept them up late on "school nights". The track team regularly pulled team members out of class to go to most-of-the-day meets. Class was sometimes cancelled to facilitate a tournament. 

The Two Sides of Criticism: Sports fans love to criticize every move a coach makes, but at the same time will get nasty if criticism comes from the wrong quarter. The fans of a team that isn't doing so well will spend hours debating the relative merits of their team's game day strategy.  They call for the coach to be fired over losses. They wait in the queue to comment on sports radio talk shows. But some fans will try to shut down criticism with the position that unless you're actually a current or former coach or player you have no grounds to criticize, because you can't do any of it yourself, so you have no grounds to point fingers. (My position is that if you have a high-profile job that depends on thousands of people being excited about your work, and you accept the adulation when you're doing well, accepting the criticism is part of the job) College sports isn't much better, although more of the anger is directed at the coaching staff since players, being students, get rotated out every few years. Some fans will defect complaints about a team's losses by pointing out that "they're just kids", while having no problem putting those same "kids" on a pedestal and subjecting them to hero worship when the team is winning. 

"It's OUR Team - Why Aren't You a Fan?": I saw this as a transplant from the East Coast to Nebraska. Even when I was a sports fan, football never interested me, so I was indifferent to the local college team. This apparently wasn't good enough. Obnoxious local fans intimated that there was something wrong with me for not enthusiastically rooting for the home team. This introduced me to a phenomenon that I'm sure exists wherever there are sports teams - the locals expect new arrivals to jettison their loyalties to their former city's teams and taking on the local boys, while locals, if they move away, fully expect to retain their team loyalties. One of those mysteries. 

The Glory Days: In any sports league, division or conference there tend to be "dynasties". One team, for various reasons, dominates and wins a few championships. These sports dynasties don't last forever though. For various reasons the top dogs get replaced by the new dogs. This leads to two differing yet related behaviors. Fans of teams who were regularly beaten by championship winners experience a sense of schadenfreude when their former tormenters aren't so good any more. While beating them while they were on top might have been an accomplishment worth bragging about, beating them years after their winning days have faded away isn't much to brag about. The other side of this is the fans of the former golden boys haven't forgotten those glory days. When they are being mocked by their opponents for being thrashed in a blowout, their retort is to brag about championships that took place before the current players were born. My own local college team is in this category. Teams that easily beat them today are giddy with celebratory excitement that they beat a struggling team with a losing record, while the loser's fans console themselves that at least they're has-beens and not never-beens despite being losers in the present. 

Loyalty Doesn't Go Both Ways: Once upon a time a player on a professional team might spend a majority of his career with one team. As a fan, it was easy to have your favorite players - you might even switch teams if the team had the audacity to trade your favorite. (My dad was a New York Rangers hockey fan. In his youth they traded his guy to the Montreal Canadiens and he became a lifelong Montreal fan) These days players are compensated better and have more opportunities to get the best deal for themselves by negotiating with different teams. They are, rightly so, more concerned with their own future and lack a loyalty and connection to the cities where they play. Many don't even live in their team's cities in the off-season. So, have fun cheering on your team, but they don't really care about you or your city.

Everyone has something that entertains them. For many that's sports - not me though!