Perspective and Apologetics, Part 1(?)

I went to church on Christmas Eve and lived to tell about it.  The last time I was in a church with an actual service of some sort going[1] before that was the summer of 2008 and I was there for a wedding.  I kind of suspected I’d spontaneously combust.  I, um, I did not.

I know, right?

Anyway, I actually kinda like the whole church on Christmas Eve thing.  I always have.  It’s especially nice at my parents’ church, since it’s all about singing old songs with traditional arrangements and brass and choral music and whatnot.  I’ve always liked candlelight, too.  That might seem weird, but just go with it, okay Steve?  Gosh.

Church involved the traditional reading of Luke 2, which was fascinating to me.  For the uninitiated, Luke 2 is the story of Joseph and Mary heading to Bethlehem in order to do their bit for the census and Mary giving birth and laying Jesus in a manger.  It’s entirely possible that Christmas Eve was the first time I’ve really encountered that passage since I left the church.  I was amazed by it upon this encounter, however.

The whole story is such transparent bullshit.  Seriously.[2]

The setup itself doesn’t make a lick of sense.  A census that requires someone to go back to his hometown in order to register would be massively disruptive to basically everyone.  Considering that the Roman Empire spanned the better part of the known world and it’s inherently possible someone in the military or a trader or a minor governmental functionary could have been born in, say, Gaul and living in, say, Anatolia at the time that person would have had to make an extremely dangerous journey that would last months in order to simply raise his hand and say, “Hey!  I’m alive!”

I think I’ve pointed out that problem on this very blog in the past, but there are several other things that occurred to me while reading it this time.  Here’s a not-exactly-exhaustive list of problems I have with the whole thing:

1.  I’d always kind of handwaved the return to Bethlehem as Joseph going home to be counted.  That’s kind of how everyone seems to do it.  But the Bible just says he did it because he “was of the house and family of David.”  That wouldn’t make the journey the equivalent of me returning from Dallas to Chicago for the 2010 census, but me going from Dallas to Cleveland because that’s where my dad is from even though I’ve never lived in Ohio.  Although since David’s house was actually started several hundred years prior to the “events” of Luke 2, it’s more like me having to return to Wales to be counted, because that’s where my great-to-the-fiftieth-power grandfather was from.  That detail, meanwhile, creates another problem.

2.  They go to Bethlehem so Joseph and Mary can be counted because Joseph is of the house and family of David.  But Jesus was supposed to be a descendent of David.  Joseph wasn’t actually the father of Jesus, so Mary would have to be the descendent of David, which would mean that Joseph and Mary were doing the incest thing (not completely unwarranted speculation, given the time period, but also not exactly a great argument).  The genealogy in Matthew 1 makes it pretty clear that Jesus was descended from David through Joseph, however, which makes the incest argument somewhat more distant.  So, basically, in order to harmonize the idea of Joseph and Mary heading to Bethlehem in order to place the birth of Jesus in the City of David, the Bible totally destroys the idea of Jesus being a descendant of David.  It would have been way easier to just place Joseph and Mary in Bethlehem in the first place.  But that destroys one other bit.

3.  Jesus was, according to Christian thinking, the fulfillment of a whole fuckton of prophecies.  Isaiah 9 mentions the Prince of Peace coming from Galilee, for instance.  Another prophecy from Micah put his birth in Bethlehem.  I’m pretty sure there wasn’t anything about being born in a stable, but who the fuck knows, amirite?  The problem is that in order for Jesus to fulfill all of the various prophecies he would have had to be, well, about twenty different people.  Apologists will say, “See!  That’s proof that it’s impossible for Jesus to have been anything but the Messiah!”  Jews would, for the record, disagree with that and say something like, “You just took a bunch of stuff out of context and spun a crazy story about it.”  The Jews, for the record, are right.  But we don’t just have to trust them, we have history to back this up.

Luke 2 name checks Quirinius as the governor of Syria when Augustus called his infamous census.  Josephus, the Jewish historian, actually does mention this in connection with a minor Jewish revolt and the formation of the Zealots, who really friggin’ hated the idea of a census because there was this one part of the Bible where David called a census and it pissed Yahweh off.  I would argue that the Zealots were more pissed off about the bit where the census was the first step in the Romans making sure they got all the taxes they were owed by the Judeans, but, really, when has anyone in history ever used religion as cover for a revolt on purely secular grounds?  That’s crazy talk.

Quirinius and his census happened in 6 CE, right after Judea was added to Syria.  This, for the record, is a fascinating wrinkle that I never noticed.  In the space between the Maccabeean Revolt (140 BCE) and the coming of Pompey and Roman power (63 BCE), Judea enjoyed various levels of home rule and/or complete autonomy.  In 40 BCE the Roman Senate gave Herod the Great complete control over Judea.  Herod the Great, though, was supposedly the dude the 3 Wise Men met on their way to give the baby Jesus the first ever Christmas presents and the villain of the story of the Slaughter of the Innocents, when he ordered every child under 2 killed, thereby forcing Joseph, Mary, and Jesus to flee to Egypt to fulfill yet another prophecy.  This comes up in Matthew 2, for those who are wondering.

Herod the Great died in 4 BCE.  Does anyone other than me see the problem?  If Quirinius’ census forced Joseph and Mary to “return” to Bethlehem in order for Herod the Great to kill a bunch of babies in order to force Joseph and Mary to flee to Egypt, that 10 year gap is a huge problem.  That, however, isn’t the big wrinkle that I’ve never noticed before.  I think I’ve even mentioned that problem in a post in the past.

The simple solution to that problem is that it was a different Herod.  Ol’ Herod the Great had sons, after all.  One was in charge of Galilee and the other took over Judea after 4 BCE.  So he could have been the murderous bastard who killed a bunch of cute little babies in order to cement his position as the official King of the Jews (as selected by the Roman Senate…).  Here’s the wrinkle: go back to Quirinius.  His census came in 6 CE after Judea was added to Syria for governance purposes.  Why did this happen?  Because Herod Archelaus, the other potential villain of the 3 Wise Men story was fired by the Romans in 6 CE for incompetence.  Quirinius was given Judea and told to take a survey and start taxing the Judeans after the only other Herod who could have ordered the death of Jewish babies in Bethlehem was taken out of the picture.

That’s a massive plot hole, I’d say.

It is, of course, entirely possible that the census in question was one of Augustus’s censuses that he called in 28 BCE, 8 BCE, and 14 CE or a different local census and Luke just got confused.  That seems to be the consensus I’ve seen amongst the “historians who don’t want to give up on the Jesus story’s veracity” set.  That is, of course, possible.  But the whole bit where it calls the Bible’s historical accuracy and relevancy to the carpet makes it much harder for the apologist.  It also draws attention to the fact that the whole story is an attempted harmonization of a whole bunch of different, disconnected prophecies that were strung together as a post hoc Argumentum ad Jesus as Christos.

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Oddly, this brings me to a little poem Fred Clark linked to before Christmas.  It’s a tongue-in-cheek addition to the famous parable of the six blind men and the elephant.[3]  Our wordsmith adds in a seventh verse to John Godfrey Saxe’s poetic interpretation of the story:

The seventh man of Indostan
Just listened to them brawl,
And sighed, “These fools cannot agree,
Their minds are far too small.
From their dispute it’s plain that there’s
No elephant at all!”

This…this isn’t clever.  It is, however, instructive.  Our wordsmith has decided that it’s okay to disagree over the nature of god because it’s not possible to fully understand god due to human perspective.  That’s the entire point of the original story, after all.

To our initial collection of blind men, however, has been added an atheist.  This fellow is a smug  bastard who hears everyone arguing over the nature of the elephant and makes a completely unwarranted conclusion that the argument itself implies his fellows are arguing over nothing.

Unfortunately for anyone who thinks this makes sense, Carl Sagan answered the argument already.[4]  It would be possible for the seventh blind man to walk up to the elephant and touch the damn thing and realize that, yes, something is there.  So the seventh blind man ends up looking not only like a smug bastard, but also an idiot.  As such, our friend the would-be poet is saying, “Atheists are really stupid, neener neener.”

He doesn’t consider the possibility that someone who doesn’t believe that there’s no god could possibly have arrived at that belief from an intellectually rigorous place.  His entire argument boils down to, “Non-religious people hear religious people arguing and decide that means religious people are wrong.”  This is an incredibly arrogant and, dare I say, narrow minded approach to the non-religious.  It’s especially arrogant when approaching actual atheists.

Your average apologist relies on stringing together post hoc arguments and relies on everyone accepting the same premises that he or she has already advanced.  As long as you, say, just accept the idea that the Biblical account of Jesus’s birth was historically accurate that’s fine.  You can even handwave past the bit where Matthew’s account and Luke’s account cannot possibly exist in the same universe.  That requires everyone involved to still agree with the basic premise about the Jesus story, however.  Someone who looks beyond the story to the context and says, “Wait, all of this stuff looks like it was just kind of thrown together and it doesn’t make any sense at all,” isn’t going to be swayed by being told that they don’t believe because they’re hearing different religious people argue about the nature of god.

That’s why the apologist and the non-believer talk past each other.  They inhabit two completely different universes.

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[1]My storytelling guild meets in a church.  I don’t think that counts.

[2]I’ll bet you didn’t see THAT coming.

[3]Quick refresher for those who don’t want to follow the link: Six blind men are taken to an elephant.  Each touches a different part and says, “Ah ha, the elephant is like _______________.”  They then proceed to argue about the nature of the elephant even though they are all correct and also all completely wrong.

[4]For those who don’t want to follow the link: it’s Carl Sagan’s famous story of the invisible dragon in the garage.  Basically, someone comes up to you and says there’s a dragon in their garage.  You say you can’t see it, so they say it’s invisible.  You go up to touch it but they say it’s incorporeal.  Every attempt to prove the existence of the dragon isn’t met with actual proof, but further dodges.

Comments

[Michael Mock]

Studying actual history does put an interesting perspective on things...

[The Everlasting Dave]

I'm scared of both invisible dragons, and being blind around elephants.

[DagoodS]

The last Christmas Eve service I attended—2010—the program included intermixing readings from Matthew and Luke. My mind kept spinning around the incongruities. Including Matthew’s dating (pre 4 BCE) to Luke’s (6 CE); Matthew having them scared of Jerusalem, Luke having them go every year. Matthew had them from Bethlehem, moving to Nazareth. Luke had them from Nazareth, vacationing in Bethlehem.

And so on…

Every time the reader skipped from Matthew to Luke (or vice versa) my mind filled with questions. I couldn’t just sit back and enjoy the story for a story.

Too bad. It’s a fun tale. “Boy does good.” Plot, intrigue, reversal of expectation. Just not fun anymore.

(By the way. I read every blog entry. Don’t comment much. Your blog would be missed.)

[Firedrake]

Everlasting Dave, how about invisible Firedrakes? :-)

As regards the census, there doesn't seem to be any historical evidence for what Luke describes. And if it was the census of Quirinius (which only applied to Roman citizens, and didn't require people to go to ancestral homes), Herod had been dead for several years. Basically the answer is either "this bit of Luke is wrong" or lots of doubletalk without evidence supporting it.

And if your worldview depends on everything in the Bible being Right...

[The Everlasting Dave]

If you can breathe fire and I can't know where you are, then yes, you frighten me. Nothing personal, I just like a little warning before I'm burned to a crisp. This is why visible dragons are less frightening than the invisible ones.