In Professor Ehrman’s latest series of posts on where Jesus was born I questioned the possible gullibility of Luke’s readers in particular concerning the story in Luke that Herod had all makes 2 years old and under killed. As is Bart’s tendency he answered my first question, but didn’t give it a lot of detail (not blaming him, he’s a busy man I understand!).
My question was: how gullible must the readers of Luke have been if they accepted what Luke wrote concerning Herod and the murder of the innocents. Historically we know there is no way this could have happened! An act so heinous would have been mentioned by some ancient writer somewhere.
In my question I said that admittedly the author of Luke was writing perhaps a couple of generations after the supposed act, but surely there were some people old enough to have remembered the time period and would have known that Luke was describing something that never happened. Also, there were surely a few wealthy/educated readers of Luke’s earliest edition of his gospel who would have known better. I have to wonder how this story was received! We know the gospels at this early date were NOT considered inspired and they were definitely not considered Scripture like the books of the OT so perhaps the anecdotal nature of the massacre of the innocents wasn’t that big of a deal to the early readers whether it was true or not.
Thoughts?
One has only to look at the present day cults and variations on Christian religions to find examples of the gullibility of most of the “religious” population. Scientology in particular requires absurd beliefs invented by a science fiction writer and is only about fifty years old. New enough that it can be researched with a fair degree of accuracy. No aliens have been actually seen, and the practices can be readily debunked as paranormal fraud, yet celebrities and many others have become adherents and the church has gained great wealth. I don’t think there has ever been a shortage of gullible people. Many are even elected to the United States Congress, much to my amazement and dismay.
The problem is that most Christians believe every single word and that is when religious text becomes dangerous. Plus as you said, because it was written many decades later then they could make up anything they wanted. Bart confirms the illiteracy at that time in that region was probably 95% and so the Gospels and Paul’s letters must have been read out to congregations by the few literate church leaders. You make the absolute right point is that even in that period of a few decades, there would have been some non bliblical sources for such a heinous crime like that. Its only in the last 400 years or so that people could read the bible for themselves and that meant the church had sole ownership of religious text spoken/written in latin which made it even more difficult for even literate people to agree or disagree with what THEIR interpretations were. In fact the Catholic Church said they were the ONLY ones that could interprete them and nobody else should try and do so.
Is it really credible that most sensible people today, believe the wafer and wine is transformed into the body and blood of Jesus when the Priest waves hands over them before they are given out? Clearly they do, unless they are keeping mum. That is the power and influence they had/have over millions of people.
When the Gospel writers who were probably Greek Gentiles, how much knowledge would they have about Jewish Scriptures so that they could scan them without translation and then use them as they did for various stories including prophecy? I doubt that many could read hebrew or aramaic. Then how many Christian Jews would have been in fluent Greek languages?
Good points. I was reading a short article on a blog a week or two ago written by a scholar of early Christianity who posits that the literacy rate of early Christians was much, much higher than is generally accepted. I think his claims are ridiculous though, especially that 50% could read/write at an acceptable level. Maybe you can convince some people in the reading level claim, but the writing level is absurdly ridiculous. Most people had no reason to NEED to write. I think Bart wrote something about that on his blog recently. Why else have the scribal industry? Family history is another interest of mine and after over 20 years of reading census forms I can well attest to the vast number of people who have the “read” column checked, but not the “write” column. I’m not saying this translates at all to the abilities of early Christians, but it does say something about the lack of a need to be able to write.
gmatthews said
In Professor Ehrman’s latest series of posts on where Jesus was born I questioned the possible gullibility of Luke’s readers in particular concerning the story in Luke that Herod had all makes 2 years old and under killed. As is Bart’s tendency he answered my first question, but didn’t give it a lot of detail (not blaming him, he’s a busy man I understand!).My question was: how gullible must the readers of Luke have been if they accepted what Luke wrote concerning Herod and the murder of the innocents. Historically we know there is no way this could have happened! An act so heinous would have been mentioned by some ancient writer somewhere.
In my question I said that admittedly the author of Luke was writing perhaps a couple of generations after the supposed act, but surely there were some people old enough to have remembered the time period and would have known that Luke was describing something that never happened. Also, there were surely a few wealthy/educated readers of Luke’s earliest edition of his gospel who would have known better. I have to wonder how this story was received! We know the gospels at this early date were NOT considered inspired and they were definitely not considered Scripture like the books of the OT so perhaps the anecdotal nature of the massacre of the innocents wasn’t that big of a deal to the early readers whether it was true or not.
Thoughts?
There is no record, as far as I’m aware, of Herod killing young children in Bethlehem. However, the historical question is: Was Herod responsible for the death, the slaughter, of young children. Indeed he was.
”…..so they were cut to pieces by great multitudes, as they were crowded together in narrow streets, and in houses, or were running away to the temple; nor was there any mercy showed either to infants, or to the aged, or to the weaker sex; insomuch that although the king sent about and desired them to spare the people, nobody could be persuaded to withhold their right hand from slaughter, but they slew people of all ages, like madmen. War: book 1 ch.18.
This occurred at the siege of Jerusalem in 37 b.c.e.
That the gospel of Matthew has connected Herod with the ‘slaughter of innocents’ is a historical fact (re the Josephus account). That the gospel of Matthew goes further and connects this historical event to a birth narrative in a different place – well, that’s combining history and prophecy. With a knowledge of Herodian history, an early reader of the gospel of Matthew would be able to distinguish the prophetic Bethlehem birth narrative from the history of Herod I. Herodian history has been used to add drama to the Bethlehem birth narrative – and, of course, to demonstrate Herod’s anti Jewish messiah temperament. A disposition that would be displayed whatever birth date a gospel writer would present for the birth of a messiah figure during the rule of Herod I. After all, Herod had just had the last King of the Jews executed – he is not going to stand by and allow all his work to be for naught…
Sorry, but with all due respect, I think you’re reaching by associating the episode Josephus describes with the slaughter of the innocents. Children are always a casualty of war and I’m sure it happened far, far more often that has been described. The death of infants in war is but one of the many contributing factors to the incredibly high infant mortality rate of this time period. What Josephus describes is the norm (the death of the infants that he mentions) and not the exception. There isn’t a single period in history or a culture that made exceptions for children in war time. Infants and children were and always will be a casualty of war. I doubt anyone looked at something Herod did in 37BCE and used it as inspiration for a prophecy, let alone a common atrocity (as we would call it with our modern sensibilities) that happened all the time.
In war anyone is a target, the old, the young and the infants. What Luke describes, however, is a specific targeted act something much different than what must have been a common occurrence in wartime.
gmatthews said
Sorry, but with all due respect, I think you’re reaching by associating the episode Josephus describes with the slaughter of the innocents. Children are always a casualty of war and I’m sure it happened far, far more often that has been described. The death of infants in war is but one of the many contributing factors to the incredibly high infant mortality rate of this time period. What Josephus describes is the norm (the death of the infants that he mentions) and not the exception. There isn’t a single period in history or a culture that made exceptions for children in war time. Infants and children were and always will be a casualty of war. I doubt anyone looked at something Herod did in 37BCE and used it as inspiration for a prophecy, let alone a common atrocity (as we would call it with our modern sensibilities) that happened all the time.In war anyone is a target, the old, the young and the infants. What Luke describes, however, is a specific targeted act something much different than what must have been a common occurrence in wartime.
The problem is that there is no historical evidence for a ‘slaughter of innocents’ in Bethlehem during the rule of Herod I.
Rather than maintain that people were gullible if they believed the ‘slaughter of innocents’ by Herod, in the gospel of Matthew, was historical – I would far rather attempt to seek historical evidence for the claim in the gospel of Matthew. That evidence is found in War: book 1. ch.18.
Just as the writer of Matthew reached for OT prophetic interpretations – so he also reached into history for a slaughter of children. That children are very often innocent victims of war is not the issue here. The issue is that, re Josephus, there is evidence that such a slaughter of children occurred under Herod’s rule – a time period in which the writer of Matthew placed his birth narrative.
How the writer of Matthew actually put the two elements together – the prophetic interpretation and the historical detail – is where his creative ability contributed to his birth narrative.
Of course, the choice is yours. I just don’t find going the ‘gullible’ route offers anything in the way of understanding the gospel of Matthew birth narrative. What I have suggested, does at the very least, offer a plausible explanation of how the writer of this gospel put his birth narrative together
If I may add a comment here.
The narrative is quite clear that Herod asked the 3 wise men to go and seek out the baby Jesus so that he too could worship him.
Its says these three wise men followed a star that eventually stood still over the inn in Bethlehem and that’s how they found him and then having done so, they didn’t report back to Herod. That’s when Herod decided to kill all the infants under 2 years old.
The first problem is being able to follow a star and then pick out the exact spot at the inn. That is impossible.
The second problem or maybe the first is who told these wise men about Jesus? What was the purpose in doing so as they were never heard of again?
The third problem is that John the Baptist and Mary the Mother of Jesus, were pregnant at the same time so was John and his parents told to go out of the area, to Egypt or somewhere? There is nothing in the text to say he did and so why wasn’t he killed by Herod?
Fourthly its very doubtful whether such a heinous crime would not have been reported widely, even in Rome itself.
Lastly, the Gospel writers were undoubted being economical with the truth the whole time as they were not eye witnesses to anything and inflation is normal. I call it lies myself because they scoured the OT to fit the story about Moses being saved by being put in a basket to escape something similar. And so once again they drew a parallel to deceive an ignorant audience.
How can we take such stuff seriously and say it doesn’t matter when almost the whole Christian Church believe such things to be true and they made him God himself so that ANYTHING he was reported to have said is treated as being from the mouth of God and thus not open to question. They did again and again and hoped nobody would notice.
John Bunyan’s Pilgrims Progress has a subtitle that says its an Allegory. It has all the trials and tribulations of ficticious characters with a moral thread running throughout with a reward to those who stick the course. That subtitle should be on every single bible ever printed and that would have alleviated all the problems we see in the OT and NT. Its obvious that 21st century secularism is responsible for a more moral and compassionate society than was ever the case in biblical history. Its time we ditched it all and grew up. Almost every single person with a reasonable education has a better understanding than any writer in the bible ever had, including Jesus and Paul. We give them far too much credit and far too much respect! And still you go into any Church in the world and they are still preaching what these Characters did thousands of years ago as though they have some special moral code to teach us today. They don’t. Nobody would agree with slavery now or staying married to abusive spouses and not thinking about tomorrow. Or that women should be subservient to their husbands and keep silent in the church or that people should not take responsibilty for their OWN actions and say in court that God told them etc.
People will do well to remember what the NT stood for and that was the end times were coming in that generation and people had to get ready for God’s judgement and that was according to Jesus and Paul to happen shortly and certainly before many of them died.
So what happened?
NOTHING!
What Mikey said, and also my point was that what Josephus described was nothing out of the ordinary for war time in ancient times and even up to modern times. How often have American troops slaughtered Native American infants when they wiped out an encampment? Killing infants sounds appalling to those of us in refined first world countries, but back then killing infants was nothing unusual. To suggest that a single phrase from Josephus that described a commonplace event was cherry picked to be the “inspiration” for the slaughter of the innocents is, in my opinion, reaching the wrong conclusion.
I’ll echo what Mikey said by simply saying that I also think the whole thing was made up just to make Jesus into a neo-Moses.
MikeyS said
If I may add a comment here.The narrative is quite clear that Herod asked the 3 wise men to go and seek out the baby Jesus so that he too could worship him.
Its says these three wise men followed a star that eventually stood still over the inn in Bethlehem and that’s how they found him and then having done so, they didn’t report back to Herod. That’s when Herod decided to kill all the infants under 2 years old.
The first problem is being able to follow a star and then pick out the exact spot at the inn. That is impossible.
The second problem or maybe the first is who told these wise men about Jesus? What was the purpose in doing so as they were never heard of again?
The third problem is that John the Baptist and Mary the Mother of Jesus, were pregnant at the same time so was John and his parents told to go out of the area, to Egypt or somewhere? There is nothing in the text to say he did and so why wasn’t he killed by Herod?
Fourthly its very doubtful whether such a heinous crime would not have been reported widely, even in Rome itself.
Lastly, the Gospel writers were undoubted being economical with the truth the whole time as they were not eye witnesses to anything and inflation is normal. I call it lies myself because they scoured the OT to fit the story about Moses being saved by being put in a basket to escape something similar. And so once again they drew a parallel to deceive an ignorant audience.
How can we take such stuff seriously and say it doesn’t matter when almost the whole Christian Church believe such things to be true and they made him God himself so that ANYTHING he was reported to have said is treated as being from the mouth of God and thus not open to question. They did again and again and hoped nobody would notice.
John Bunyan’s Pilgrims Progress has a subtitle that says its an Allegory. It has all the trials and tribulations of ficticious characters with a moral thread running throughout with a reward to those who stick the course. That subtitle should be on every single bible ever printed and that would have alleviated all the problems we see in the OT and NT. Its obvious that 21st century secularism is responsible for a more moral and compassionate society than was ever the case in biblical history. Its time we ditched it all and grew up. Almost every single person with a reasonable education has a better understanding than any writer in the bible ever had, including Jesus and Paul. We give them far too much credit and far too much respect! And still you go into any Church in the world and they are still preaching what these Characters did thousands of years ago as though they have some special moral code to teach us today. They don’t. Nobody would agree with slavery now or staying married to abusive spouses and not thinking about tomorrow. Or that women should be subservient to their husbands and keep silent in the church or that people should not take responsibilty for their OWN actions and say in court that God told them etc.
People will do well to remember what the NT stood for and that was the end times were coming in that generation and people had to get ready for God’s judgement and that was according to Jesus and Paul to happen shortly and certainly before many of them died.
So what happened?
NOTHING!
Sure, nothing happened in Bethlehem.
All I am suggesting is that the writer of Matthew had certain material at his disposal when writing his birth narrative. The manner in which this material was used (OT interpretation and historical realities) was the result of the writer’s creativity. The issue is how the narrative was created not whether the narrative itself is true or not.
I’d far rather acknowledge the writer’s creativity with the material he had to hand – than discard his story as having no relevance to the historical context in which it is set, the rule of Herod I. I’d much rather deal with the history of Herod’s rule than get side-tracked into, for me, the dead-end of nothing happened in Bethlehem. That nothing happened in Bethlehem is not the end of the debate – it’s only the first step in attempting to understand what the writer of Matthew was doing with implicating Herod in his birth narrative.
I wrote this on another site and you may find it interesting here:
Herod probably died in the year 4. That date is corroborated by an eclipse of the moon which occurred on the very night that Herod burnt Matthias alive ** you do not have permission to see this link **
So that leaves Luke in error, because we know that Publius Sulpicius Quirinius was governor of Syria, and that a census was made in A.D. 7. We can read in the ** you do not have permission to see this link **, “any census in Judea before the well-known one in the year A.D. 7 is impossible”.
How can these be reconciled? They cannot. Yeshua Ben Yosef probably was not born in Bethlehem because of a census or not before “** you do not have permission to see this link **“. However he was born in Bethlehem as there are many accounts, Christian or not. Even the Quran hints to it. Matthew and Luke are the only two books describing the nativity and the importance of his birth at the time is was not as important as it is now – to Christians.
You may want to read, Sanders, E. P. The historical figure of Jesus. Penguin, 1993. Sanders discusses both birth narratives in detail, contrasts them, and judges them not historical on p. 85–88. Specifically:
Sanders’ considers Luke’s census, in which everyone returned to his ancestral home, as not historically credible given that Emperor Augustus, known for being rational, would not have uprooted everyone in the Empire by forcing them to return to their ancestral cities and that people were not able to trace their own lineages back forty-two generations.
Another thing is that the ‘Murder of the Innocents’ story suffers from internal contradictions. This story posits Rachel mourning for her supposedly murdered children. The town of Bethlehem was always a tribal possession of Judah…. But Judah’s mother wasn’t Rachel, it was Leah! (Gen 29.35). This story has the wrong mother mourning the wrong children. It’s also curious how Jewish eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus could be so profoundly ignorant of Judaism!
I have a picky semantic point. According to dictionary.com, “gullible” means “easily deceived or cheated.” I do not think we can assume that any of the gospel authors intended to deceive anyone. A better word might be “credulous” which means “willing to believe or trust too readily, especially without proper or adequate evidence; gullible.” Credulous is a broader word that covers believing all sorts of stories, not just deceitful ones.
My guess is that people in the first century may not have been gullible when someone tried to separate them from their money, but they were credulous in the sense that they didn’t have the same concept of needing or wanting evidence to believe something. Consider that Edgar Allen Poe invented the mystery story. Ancient people just didn’t have the same ideas about investigating things or solving mysteries.
gmatthews said
In Professor Ehrman’s latest series of posts on where Jesus was born I questioned the possible gullibility of Luke’s readers in particular concerning the story in Luke that Herod had all makes 2 years old and under killed. As is Bart’s tendency he answered my first question, but didn’t give it a lot of detail (not blaming him, he’s a busy man I understand!).My question was: how gullible must the readers of Luke have been if they accepted what Luke wrote concerning Herod and the murder of the innocents. Historically we know there is no way this could have happened! An act so heinous would have been mentioned by some ancient writer somewhere.
In my question I said that admittedly the author of Luke was writing perhaps a couple of generations after the supposed act, but surely there were some people old enough to have remembered the time period and would have known that Luke was describing something that never happened. Also, there were surely a few wealthy/educated readers of Luke’s earliest edition of his gospel who would have known better. I have to wonder how this story was received! We know the gospels at this early date were NOT considered inspired and they were definitely not considered Scripture like the books of the OT so perhaps the anecdotal nature of the massacre of the innocents wasn’t that big of a deal to the early readers whether it was true or not.
Thoughts?
Excuse me, but the slaughter of the innocents is in Matthew, not Luke.
gmatthews said
In Professor Ehrman’s latest series of posts on where Jesus was born I questioned the possible gullibility of Luke’s readers in particular concerning the story in Luke that Herod had all makes 2 years old and under killed. As is Bart’s tendency he answered my first question, but didn’t give it a lot of detail (not blaming him, he’s a busy man I understand!).My question was: how gullible must the readers of Luke have been if they accepted what Luke wrote concerning Herod and the murder of the innocents. Historically we know there is no way this could have happened! An act so heinous would have been mentioned by some ancient writer somewhere.
In my question I said that admittedly the author of Luke was writing perhaps a couple of generations after the supposed act, but surely there were some people old enough to have remembered the time period and would have known that Luke was describing something that never happened. Also, there were surely a few wealthy/educated readers of Luke’s earliest edition of his gospel who would have known better. I have to wonder how this story was received! We know the gospels at this early date were NOT considered inspired and they were definitely not considered Scripture like the books of the OT so perhaps the anecdotal nature of the massacre of the innocents wasn’t that big of a deal to the early readers whether it was true or not.
Thoughts?
Basically, the story has contextual credibility. Herod the Great could have done it, although most scholars today know he didn’t. He committed other atrocities. The ancient community members listening to the gospel being read aloud would have had no problems accepting it. Cruelty on this scale has a sadly high rate of occurrence in history. Gullibility is however an interesting human feature. Once you fall in love with a theory , ideology or religion , academic skills may even bolster it.
gavriel said
Basically, the story has contextual credibility. Herod the Great could have done it, although most scholars today know he didn’t. He committed other atrocities. The ancient community members listening to the gospel being read aloud would have had no problems accepting it. Cruelty on this scale has a sadly high rate of occurrence in history. Gullibility is however an interesting human feature. Once you fall in love with a theory , ideology or religion , academic skills may even bolster it.
Entirely plausible, of course, but I would find that possibility more palatable if it was scaled down to a story of Herod killing all the first born in a single town/village/region. Perhaps Prof Ehrman’s new book will provide some insight in the section on oral history.
gmatthews said
gavriel said
Basically, the story has contextual credibility. Herod the Great could have done it, although most scholars today know he didn’t. He committed other atrocities. The ancient community members listening to the gospel being read aloud would have had no problems accepting it. Cruelty on this scale has a sadly high rate of occurrence in history. Gullibility is however an interesting human feature. Once you fall in love with a theory , ideology or religion , academic skills may even bolster it.Entirely plausible, of course, but I would find that possibility more palatable if it was scaled down to a story of Herod killing all the first born in a single town/village/region. Perhaps Prof Ehrman’s new book will provide some insight in the section on oral history.
First, I think that “gullibility” is only meaningful when considering the individual’s background culture. Most ordinary ancient people were deeply superstitious and would not deem the story particularly strange. Learned local church leaders may have considered the embellishments as useful for promoting the core message: Jesus’ birth and messianic role is acknowledged by the wisdom of the East and persecuted by a cruel King. Accidentially, Herod was specially commisoned by the Roman emperor as a regional taxing authority and as such much trusted. No wonder Luke made a complete U-turn, making Jesus’ birth deeply seated in the imperial tax system!
Many Texans recently prepared for the US military to take their guns in a massive assault across the West. It was a training exercise.
Yes, I think people would have been very ready to believe the Roman vassal would kill all the children of a certain age. Especially if it was written just after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. They hated Roman representation, had just lost their homeland and many were dispersed throughout the Empire.
Also, I have read that Herod killed many of his own offspring for fear of competition for the throne. I did get that from “Killing Jesus”, so do not quote me on that.
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