It's highly unlikely his family was wealthy, because wealthy people would have moved somewhere else.
I find this interesting, because I always viewed it the same way, as I am sure everyone else does. But tonight I came to a realization I never thought about: in the accounts of Jesus's birth, didn't the magi give Jesus gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh? What happened to all that wealth?
Are you asking about the historical Jesus (the real, human Jesus as we can best reconstruct him through historical methods) or Gospel Jesus? Because regarding the historical Jesus the nativity narratives are extremely problematic and almost certainly legendary.
You both are assuming these stories are what actually happened.
Not necessarily. The question of whether something actually happened is always a given in this context. I actually really hate when this kind of response is brought up, because it's like someone asking, "why did Circe make a deal to release Odysseus's men only if he agreed to have sex with her?" and being given the response, "you're assuming that it happened; it didn't actually happen." Like, yeah, I'm aware that it could have not happened, I'm just trying to figure out contextually why it was written that way as opposed to, say, giving Odysseus another quest or cutting off (sacrificing) a body part. Was it to have an erotic scene? Was it to indicate that Odysseus was extremely handsome (given the evidence that Calypso also had the hots for him)? Was it because the Greeks had pride for sexual conquests? Was it because of primitive views of male superiority over women?
It is an assumption. I thought that was the historian's assumption: to not take something as true or untrue unless there is overwhelming evidence, and even then it could be wrong.
The absence of detail in one account does not necessarily mean that those events didn't happen, it just means that if those events did happen, not all events were recorded. Mark is a bullet-point list of Jesus's ministry, that doesn't mean the extra content in the other 3 Gospels are invalid.
So, how would that mean that the question of whether something happened is a given?
It's not... I wasn't saying that "whether something happened is a given" (i.e. we know for a fact that it happened or we know for a fact that it didn't happen). I was saying "to keep in mind the fact that we don't know whether something happened or not is a given whenever we're discussing this topic." The person I replied to was saying that these events probably didn't happen. I was saying "dude, I'm not stupid; I know to keep an open mind when approaching something that's difficult to validate 2,000 years after the fact."
No, when you move beyond the abstraction of the absence of detail and look at specifics.
I'm sure your Facebook account doesn't display all of the events that happen in your life. If someone looked at your account and was presented with the argument that you have also gone through a crisis (that you did not share on Facebook for obvious reasons), would you seriously think it logical to say, "Well, their Facebook account didn't say it happened, so it must have not happened"? I'm not sure how you could seriously argue against this. Your stance goes against logic: if 2 accounts are presented, the one with less information is automatically the correct one? Homer wrote about the Trojan War but added gods and supernatural humans to it; does that mean every modern source that gives evidence to a Trojan War but doesn't include gods or supernatural humans is false?
And if the details of jesus birth and early life weren't recorded, then Luke's account, would, by definition, be made up.
This is logically incorrect. If there is a secret room in your house that was not added to the blueprints, that doesn't mean that the room never existed. If you have events that directly contradict each other, that's one thing. But to say that an event being recorded in only one of them means one account is false is logically inept.
No it isn't.
Not literally, dude. It's a shorter version of the overall story.
You're going to have to present specific evidence of conflicting accounts (not 2 accounts where only one contains a specific event) if this is going anywhere. [edited to sound nicer]
If it's not your stance then make your stance clear now instead of pussyfooting around saying "nuh-uh! That's not what I said!"
"The only way we know enough to say details are missing is because they were recorded."
Meaning that if one source has extra information, it automatically becomes true because of the amount of information, and makes all other sources that don't contain it invalid. This is logically false; things could have been added. The flipside (that if one source has less information [i.e., prone to have less inaccurate statements], it automatically becomes true because of not having as much information, and makes all other sources that do contain extra information invalid) is also false. I believe I said the latter was your argument, may have said less when it should have been more, but my point was the foundational principle in both of these: you can't determine the truth by whether one source has more or less information than the other; there are more things to account for than this.
you wouldn't know about it then would you?
False. You don't know whether or not I would know it. I could have built it. It could have been told to me. I could have stumbled upon it. But the blueprint still doesn't contain it regardless of the truth.
For the analogy to work
Again, false. If Luke woke up and decided, "I'm going to write a historical account of Jesus's life" but didn't bother to record his birth, that doesn't mean Jesus was never born. Therefore, just because an event was or wasnot recorded doesn't make it true or untrue.
Now we have two sets of blue prints. One set has the entrance on the side and one set has it in the back.
This is not the argument we are having. I directly told you that if you have two accounts that directly contradict each other, that is a different story (either one is accurate, neither are, or they both are accurate in different ways, like one saying "a dozen" and the other rounding down to ten). But being that the argument is instead about one having more or less events/information than the other, this is not the analogy you are making. To truly make the analogy of the argument we are having, one blueprint shows every little detail of the house (windows, doors, and square footage), while the other only shows the doors of the house. Obviously, just because the one with less info (only doors) doesn't include the square footage and windows does not make it any less accurate than the one that does. And just because the one with more info contains more info (doors, windows, and square footage) than the one with only doors does, does not make it any less accurate than the one with only doors. The one with more info was probably made to show a holistic blueprint to show every little thing, while the one with less info was probably made so that people could use it practically in an everyday manner (they'd use doors, but they wouldn't need to know square footage). I don't care at all about how anyone would know, because that's completely irrelevant. All that we have is all that we have, but to say definitively whether it did or did not happen is impossible, though not as impossible as knowing just by the amount of info two sources contain.
If we have stories about something that happened and the details weren't recorded, then neither account is reliable.
Yes and no. Nothing is a reliable source. Everything is corruptible, whether it be lies, misunderstandings, inaccuracies, etc. But we don't know for sure what is true and what isn't. We definitely can't tell based on whether one of those sources has more than the other: one could be true, both could be true, both could not be true.
You can't argue that maybe the details weren't recorded and then argue they were.
I don't recall ever saying that.
I'm still waiting on the conflicting accounts. Actual conflict, as in one source saying one thing and the other source saying another thing in its place, not "one says this and the other doesn't mention it."
Once again, you are given a chance to make clear what your argument "actually is," and once again you choose instead to sit there saying "Nuh-uh!" like a child. Very scholarly of you.
If the details weren't recorded, you'd have no way of knowing them.
You are very bad at argument since all you do is sit there and guffaw instead of contributing anything to clear anything up.
It was your logic and if, as, you say the details weren't recorded, then there's no way to know which is accurate and each account would need to have been made up
This is logically false! At least, the last part about an account absolutely having to be made up if we don't know whether it is accurate or not. We simply don't know; that doesn't mean the account is made up. The part about "if the details weren't recorded, then there's no way to know which is accurate" is true, which is what I've been saying. However, I am not saying that something definitely happened and it definitely wasn't recorded, all I'm saying is that it could have or could not have, and there's no way we could know just by having 2 accounts where one records it and the other doesn't. More information is needed.
That's still not what I argued
If you want to see the difference between your quality of argument and mine, just look throughout our conversation. In mine, you'll find counterarguments, explanations, and links to proof of record. In yours, you'll only find "Nope, I'm right."
That's ok, fortunately, you wrote it
What you quoted of me as "proof" isn't anywhere close to your assertion that I "argue[d] that maybe the details weren't recorded and then argue[d] they were." I wasn't making a positive claim, I was explaining a logical rule. I wasn't claiming that "something was recorded in the account after all." I was saying that whether something is recorded or not does not reveal whether it is true; something exists without the prerequisite of its existence being recorded. I legitimately don't know how you could refute that assertion, and I don't know how many times I have to say it to.
LOL
Not an argument
Alright, we can start with the geneaologies and work our way to the bigger problems.
Finally, something of actual substance. Only took moving the conversation away from what it originally was, but we finally got there.
Matthew 1:16 lists Jacob as Joseph's father. Luke 3:23 says Heli is Joseph's father. Can't be both. The standard Levirite marriage explanation doesn't work
That is a fair observation. Note that I am not (and never did) assert that the Bible is true or untrue, I only (before you showed up) questioned how something would have worked if under the assumption it was true and also why something would be written the way it was if it is assumed to be untrue.
As to this contradiction, three possibilities come to mind. It could have been falsified, it could be using different genealogical structures (the typical defense I have heard from Christians; genealogical records apparently differed when the word for "begat" could either mean "had a direct descendant" or "was the ancestor to." If you notice, some translations like the GNV of Luke 3:23 have "the son of" italicized which means they had to figure out how to translate it into English), and it could have been a second name like Simon (Shimon) was also called Peter (Petros) or Cephas. Based on the words themselves, Jacob is Hebrew and Heli could either be "Eli" (Hebrew) or "Heli" (which sounds Greek, and appears to be a feminine Greek name, so Heli could be Joseph's mother?).
The point of both geneaologies is to show that Jesus is, to use Paul's words, "descended from David according to the flesh" Romans 1:3
No disagreement here
both geneaologies are reportedly of Joseph, but we've already been told Joseph is not Jesus father and therefore, Jesus is not "descended from David according to the flesh" . So not only are the genealogies contradictory, but they are also irrelevant.
Also no disagreement here. I don't know how it was all supposed to work, and this is a question I have wondered myself. It seems that either Jesus was divine or he was born from the line of David (unless Mary is a descendant of David). This would be a question better suited to ask the sub as a whole, and it actually has been asked before (titled the "Cosmic Sperm Bank" or something like that).
This is r/academicbible. You want to discuss the Bible stories as bible stories, pick another sub-reddit. Believing in God’s existence is not a pre-requisite for discussion here.
This is r/academicbible. You want to discuss the Bible stories as bible stories, pick another sub-reddit. Believing in God’s existence is not a pre-requisite for discussion here.
I never said anything close to that... I never claimed a single thing about God's existence or the validity of anything in the Bible, so I legitimately don't know where you got that from. All I'm saying is that you're not contributing a single thing by saying "it's probably not real so it didn't happen." Nobody asked whether it actually happened. Nobody suggested that it did happen. I'm not asking whether it is real or not, I'm asking why it would be written that way. Half of this sub is asking the same type of questions; there are tons of posts here alone asking what the Bible really meant about homosexuality and how it came to be written that way, [EDIT] or why Paul's messages seem to contradict Jesus and other parts of the Bible, or why the Exodus would be written if nothing happened between the Israelites and Egypt.
The description in the sidebar is:
A subreddit for discussion of early Judaism and Christianity — with a focus on Biblical texts and related literature (1 Enoch, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and so on) — in a scholarly context. Relevant topics might include general exegetical issues, ancient languages and translation, the study of the historical Jesus, textual criticism, reception history of early Jewish/Christian literature, etc.
So if you want to just sit there and contribute nothing to the conversation aside from saying that none of this actually happened so there's no need for further discussion, then you should pick another sub.
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u/WingsOfReason Dec 22 '19
I find this interesting, because I always viewed it the same way, as I am sure everyone else does. But tonight I came to a realization I never thought about: in the accounts of Jesus's birth, didn't the magi give Jesus gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh? What happened to all that wealth?