Sunday 4 March 2012

The Tediousness of the Biblical Literalist

My browsings on the more acceptable reaches of the internet have alerted me to another problem with the timeline of Jesus, of which I was not previously aware. 

I would like to use this as (yet more) evidence that the Bible cannot be taken literally and unquestioningly as a historical document.  I would also like to use it as a springboard to explore why I continue to attack a 'literalist' interpretation of the Bible that is neither interesting nor supported by 'sophisticated' theologians. 

The problem of the date of Jesus' birth is well known (to me, at least).  Only two of the Gospels have nativity stories: Matthew and Luke.  Matthew tells the well-known story of the 'Massacre of the Innocents', where Bad King Herod, hearing that the Three Kings / Wise Men are expecting the birth of the next King of the Jews, has every child under two in Bethlehem killed.  It is clear that Herod is a major player in this story, and thus it cannot have taken place later than his death, in 4BC. 
Luke, on the other hand, tells the story of the Census, little donkey and manger.  The census is explicitely a Roman affair (not only does Luke name Emperor Augustus as having ordered it and Roman Governor Quirinius as carrying it out, but censuses were banned under Judaism and were not carried out while Judea was independent).  It cannot therefore have happened before the Romans annexed Judea, in 6AD. 

So I have long been familiar with the idea that there is at least a 9 year discrepancy (there being no year zero) between Jesus' birth-dates according to the two nativity accounts.  Most of these rely on Matthew's dating being accurate but there being an otherwise unrecorded period where Quirinius ruled Judea during Herod's reign.  There are many reasons this fails, but even if it did not, it would simply introduce further contradictions, as set out below. 

I have now discovered that there is a further, more involved contradiction between the two gospels. 
If we are to take Matthew seriously when he says that Jesus was born under the reign of Herod (4BC latest), and also assume that Luke is at least roughly accurate when he says that Jesus himself was about thirty years old when he began his ministry (Luke 3:23), then we can calculate that Jesus' ministry began roughly thirty years after 4BC - so around 25AD.  (We might reasonably say sometime between 23 and 27AD - any earlier or later and we would expect Luke to have said 'around thirty five' or 'around 'twenty five', not 'around thirty'.)  His ministry seems to have lasted two or three years (based on the number of Passovers recorded - three in John 5:1, 7:2 and 10:22).  So Jesus must have been crucified sometime between 25 and 30AD, if Matthew and Luke are in harmony.  This would also fit with the comment made by a Pharisee to Jesus that the Temple has 'taken 46 years to build' - we know that it was started in 19BC, so it seems likely that the comment was made in 28AD.  So far, so good. 

But Luke also tells us that John the Baptist began his ministry in 29AD (In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar - Luke 3:1), and was arrested sometime around 36AD (which is consistent with Josephus, the only other source to mention John) and Jesus began his ministry only after that; so now we have an eight year discrepancy, and Luke must have been describing a 38-year-old as 'about thirty'.  Certainly, if John was arrested for speaking out against Herod Antipas' marriage to his brother's widow, John cannot have been arrested prior to Herod Antipas' brother's death, in 34AD. 
But we also know that Jesus was crucified by Pontius Pilate - and Pilate was recalled to Rome in 36AD.  So Luke's claim that Jesus began his ministry after the arrest of JtB in 36AD cannot be squared with the Fourth Gospel's claim that Jesus' ministry lasted 2-3 years.  Even if we can squeeze the ministry into the two years between 34 and 36AD, Jesus would still have been 37 according to Matthew when Luke describes him as 'about 30'. 

So this is all very exciting, of course.  And the response from most sensible theists will be that some or all of the gospellers made an error - something with which, of course, I agree.  So why am I labouring a point which seems directed at only the weakest part of Christian claims, that of Biblical inerrancy? 

The answer is that this 'weakest part' is in fact by far the dominant strain.  The number of churches teaching Biblical literalism is alarmingly high, and indeed it is not uncommon to hear anyone who would accept the idea that the gospellers might have made a mistake described as 'not a real Christian'.  It is therefore vital that someone make the case against Biblical literalism.  For whatever reason, most liberal Christians seem unwilling to take the fight directly to their fundamentalist brethren, so I therefore feel that the atheists must take up the mantle of reason. 

Unfortunately, of course, this does leave us open to the accusation that we are attacking only the weakest form of Christianity, one that no-one (read: no liberal, but an alarming number of Christians) takes seriously.  My response, of course, will be to argue equally strongly against all forms of non-factual belief, since the one option that is not available is to give a 'free pass' to some forms of faith that simply cannot be argued against. 

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