Fire Museum Director Jeff Hunt

The Arizona Republic reported today that the director of a Texas museum destroyed a diorama that was donated by high school students because it was "historically inaccurate." Jeff Hunt, executive director of the Texas Military Forces Museum, demolished the ten by five foot diorama of the Battle of Palmetto Ranch. Gilbert Highland students invested about $23,000 and hundreds of hours of effort to create the representation of the last land battle of the Civil War.

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0214gr-diorama0214-ON.html#comments

Here is a picture of the Stalinoid Mr. Hunt.

http://www.texasmilitaryforcesmuseum.org/musnews.htm

And here is what he did:







I cannot imagine that any school would ever want to have their student's contribute to this museum. And nor can I imagine anyone wanting to donate a penny or even visit this museum under these circumstances.

If I was a volunteer to this museum, I would quit. If I was a paid employee, I would resign. If I lived in Texas, I would shun this outpost of ignorance. If I was a legislator, I would cut all funding to this institution. And if I was on the board of directors of this museum, I would immediately fire Jeff Hunt and compensate Gilbert High.

So many students look at history as something that is irrelevant, detached from their lives, and boring. Nothing can be further from the truth. History is as relevant as the shows we watch and inseparable from our lives and our future. I am reminded of the words of philosopher George Santayana: "Thosewho cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Hunt's impetuous, vainglorious actions, so remininscent of another alumni of the Texas military, can only deter students from showing any interest in remembering the past to avoid future mistakes.

Here is how to make your voice heard if you are disturbed by Hunt's actions:

Office: (512) 782-5659
Museum: (512) 782-6967
Email: museum@tx.ngb.army.mil
Executive Director: Jeff Hunt
Texas Military Forces Museum
P.O. Box 5218
Austin, Texas
78763-5218

Texas Military Forces. http://www.agd.state.tx.us/

Governor Rick Perry Information and Referral: 1-800-843-5789
Citizen's Opinion Hotline: 1-800-252-9600
Office of the Governor, P.O. Box 12428, Austin, Texas 78711
Phone: (512) 463-2000
Information and Referral: 1-800-843-5789

Historical Truth

How do we know Winston Churchill lived?

Because we've got living people who remember Churchill (including me), photos and films of him, autographs of books and papers written by him, thousands of newspaper reports of his activiites, etc. etc.

But there is a current of radical skepticism today that voids all of that to the point of solipsism, and I've seen that on this forum. Thus, the argument might go, I haven't seen Churchill, thus Churchill cannot exist. Further, even if I had seen Churchill, how can I be sure it wasn't a delusion? And certainly physical evidence can be fabricated. Reality and indeed truth as an idea has become completely subjectivized. Nothing is real except that which we convince ourselves is real, and then it is only real to us.

The broader question to me is whether there is merit in that current of historical or scientific agnosticism that claims that we cannot be sure of anything. I consider that to be an epistomological error. There is no margin of doubt that Churchill lived, and those that claim that there is a .000000 . X 10 thousandth .01 possibility that he didn't are merely being willfully ignorent. They might claim you cannot be sure as an absolute fact that you saw Churchill and they cannot be sure as an absolute fact that Churchill ever lived. They might even claim they cannot be sure that you exist or they exist! This has its roots in Karl Popper, who says you cannot prove a theory or know it is true, but you can disprove theories by proving facts that are incomaptiable with them. Thus, you cannot induct a universal truth claim, which would include the claim that Churchill lived. As applied to laboratory testing, Popperism makes scientific sense. As applied to history and philosophy generally, it defies common sense. Is there any doubt that table salt is sodium choloride, that we need oxygen to live, that professional wrestling is fake and the moon landing is real? But why is that the case? It is because in the realm of our existence, there is indeed uncertainty, and perhaps much of life is uncertain. But it does not follow that all of life is uncertain. Science and history build on a continuum from claims that are possibly certain-- "there is life on Mars"-- to those that are absolutely certain-- "Winston Churchill lived" and "some atoms are radioactive" -- from "we know that X is true" to "it is impossible to conceive that X is false".

Down Memory Lane

This website is really fun. You put in the name of the state, then the county, then the town where you grew up and it will show you old postcards of how it looked in the past.

http://www.rootsweb.com/~usgenweb/special/ppcs/ppcs.html

Cats After People

Did anyone see that fascinating documentary on the History Channel "Life After People"? The premise was that all humans suddenly vanished, and then they looked at what would happen to life as the years rolled by. They had great special effects, as you can see.

http://www.history.com/minisites/life_after_people

So, according to the show, 250 years after people disappear, the skycrapers are decaying warrens filled with vegitation, mice, and birds, making an ideal haibitat for cats. They even think that cats may develop gliding abilities, like the flying squirrel.

This isn't just speculation. Scientists looked at what happens now and then extrapolated, for example, in the case of cats, from the prolific cat colonies at Rome's colossium. It's humbling to see that nature will do just fine and argubaly better than without us. But I know Kitty would miss his kibble.

Life may end with a whimper rather than a bang. But it looks like that cats will inherit the earth.

Historical Truth

The more I learn about historiography, the more skeptical I get about it.

You've got that one right. I'm a geneologist hobbyist, and the more I dig into my past, the less certain I am about anything factual. All that you can really do is approximate with as much integrity and humility that you can muster what may have been true, and even then you are left with doubt. Consider the principle that if you can reasonably establish that a date is a fact if it is on three primary documents. From Our Story:

"My approach to writing history is to establish the facts. I then try to tie those facts into broad themes or trends, seeking correlations and implications. Finally, I try to bring history alive by using quotes and stories from people who enjoyed or endured those times that discloses the texture of everyday life. The writing of history is a search for truth, an epistemological challenge of the highest order. A fact—an objective snapshot of a chunk of space and time—is often impossible to establish, for we see life through our own glasses darkly. “Memory,” Aunt Viola Bossman notes, “is a slippery thing.” All it takes are two eyewitness accounts of the same traffic accident to make you wonder about history. Artists use this distorting process to create works of enduring creativity. Monet, my favorite painter, looked with fading eyesight at a puddle and saw a shimmer of green and red and purple. (I call the Monets at the Chicago Art Institute “my” Monets.) Beethoven, my favorite musician, with near-deaf ears heard distant cannonades and wrote his transcendent Ninth. I block my ears to hear, I shut my eyes to see.

When we try to discern historical fact, we walk in a wilderness of mirrors. Even primary documents are suspect. In analyzing these early documents, many contradictions have come to light. Some of these are more apparent than real. For example, N.P.’s first son who died at the age of one has a death record that calls him Paulus, and yet the family knew him as Nicholas. A letter from Esther Christiansen, a cousin to Aunt Elvera Anderson, finally reconciled the two names: “Aunt Bertha told me the first Nicholas was called Paul Nicholas,” she wrote in 1988. N.P.’s birth date is listed in numerous HFLs and other primary documents as April 6, 1850. Can we certify this as a fact, since we have found at least three separate documents, each stating that N.P.’s birth date was April 6, 1850? No, for N.P.’s birth document puts his birth date as April 16, 1850. I’m assuming that the birth document is correct and that the other documents are wrong, but I may be mistaken. Even if N.P. was alive today, his recollection may be incorrect. We cannot know for sure. (In the outline of his writing, it’s April 16). Some of these contradictions have their roots in the motivations and skills of those early scribes. It could be that a Lutheran clerk wasn’t inclined to be so scrupulous in recording the vital statistics of a backwoods Baptist. Other contradictions must remain for now shrouded in the mists of time."

If the Gospels Are a Fraud

If, tomorrow, you should establish that the New Testament writings are frauds, how would that change the minds of a single Christian?

I believe a lot of Christians would say "my faith is founded on lies", and cease to be Christians.

This is an interesting psychological point, but I believe that you generally are wrong. And example is the "salamander letter" purporting to show that the original account of the Mormon leader Joseph Smith's discovery of the gold tablets wasn't true. The church's reaction?

"The so-called 'Martin Harris letter' [the Salamander letter] is no repudiation of Joseph Smith, but rather probably is a further witness of the Prophet's own account of the discovery of the gold plates. (Deseret News, Church Section, Sept. 9, 1984)"

http://www.utlm.org/onlinebooks/trackingconfessions2.htm

Whenever indisuptable facts arrive on the scene, the church is quick to absorb those facts so long as they don't harm core dogmas. In this case, the facts turned out to be a fraud, and since the Smith writings where in themselves frauds, it was a fraud of a fraud. The key word is indisputable. Thus, despite the plethora of writings in the Bible that attest to a geocentric Ptolemaic cosmology, few Christians today believe that the earth is flat. Not so, in the case of evolution vs. special creationism, where the only indisputable fact is doubt.

Jesus as Myth: A Critique

It seems that you have found sufficient justification that defies the consensus of most scholars.

On the particular issue of Jesus' historicity, yes, I have come to believe that the scholarly consensus is mistaken.

"What justifies doubt is the fact that his existence as a human being is not unambiguously attested in places where I am convinced it would have been if he had been real."

Can you be more specific?

I have put a summary of my arguments on my Web site here:

http://dougshaver.com/christ/ahistor/ahistor1.htm. If you're pressed for time, go to the bottom of the page and click on "What wrong with this picture?"

I finally got a chance to read your thesis. I apologize in advance if I have misatated your argument, which I understand is somewhat as follows.

What we read in the gospels are essentially camp fire tales-- an accumulation of incidents and wisdom from the Jewish community and the surrounding mystery religions.

That's possible. It isn't quite what I have in mind, but it could work, too.

I have not done enough research myself to form a clear hypothesis about their origin, but I think they began as something akin to Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet. The stories originally were not about Jesus as such. They were collections of teachings, and Jesus, like Gibran's Almustafa, was just a mouthpiece for those teachings.

From these stories, a Christian cult began to develop.

No, that's not my theory. I think several savior cults, one of which was Paul's, existed prior to the gospel stories. The gospels, or at least an early version of Mark's gospel, was produced independently of any of those cults.

Paul of Tarsus, a hellenized Jew, saw the light and began his missionary efforts and epistles. Paul's Jesus was essentially a Platonic Form, which in the second century merged with the camp fire tales of the earlier mystery cult . And from that came the Jesus of history.

Yes, that says it pretty well.

In your discussion, on several occasions, you invoke the principle of parsimony. It seems to me that there ise too little parsimony to make this credible. For example, what I didn't get from your essay was the motivation of the merger between the mystery cults and Paul's Platonism, an explanation of how the gospels came to be especially relative to its size-- the sheer length of the account-- and the agreement between the gospels, and also the motivation behind Paul's missionary efforts and the growth of the early Christian church.

Aside from simply giving appropriate credit, one reason I referred to Doherty's work was that I was trying to keep the essay to a manageable length and so was focusing on the basic argument against historicity, not the details of an alternative account of Christianity's origins. I was hoping that anyone interested in those details would go to Doherty's Web site for them. It's not that I think he has all the details right. I think it very unlikely that any ahistoricist has all the details of Christianity's true origins right, because most of the evidence we would need to get them all right is irretrievably lost.

Why the merger? Doherty addresses that, but very briefly and so it's easy to miss. Paul's Christ doesn't grab the average person's gut very well. It's too esoteric. Your average Joe wants something a little more (literally) down to earth. As Doherty notes, savior-gods who died and came back to life were not a new idea in those days. The notion that one of them had done it as a man of this world, and had done it very recently, was new, and would have appealed to many more people than the previous versions did.

I fail to see what it is about length of the gospel story that makes it more improbable as a work of fiction than of purported history.

Insofar as the gospels agree on anything, it is easily accounted for on the supposition that they have a common origin. The disagreements among them suggest that the common origin was something other than factual history.

You and Earl Doherty place a great deal of emphasis on what he calls the silences in Paul's writings regarding the historical Jesus. It seems to me that there is a lot of straining to make a point that doesn't appear to be especially valid to me. Take the following statement by Doherty, in which questions why the message they preached wasn't the gospel of Jesus.

1 Thessalonians 2:2
. . . we had courage in our God to declare to you the gospel of God in the face of great opposition. [RSV]

Early Christian writers like Paul are constantly referring to the message they carry as the "gospel of God." They also talk of the work of God, the saving actions of God, the call of God (cf. Romans 1:16, 3:24, 1 Cor. 1:9, Phil. 1:6, Gal. 4:7, etc.). If these apostles were preaching a message about an historical Jesus who had himself taught about God and his own relationship to him, surely they would style it the "gospel of Jesus." Why is there no mention in the epistles of an earthly ministry of Jesus? On the other hand, if Jesus is a spiritual figure, a "mystery" known only through scripture and God’s revelation of him, then Paul’s message is indeed the gospel of God (see especially Romans 1:1-4), and God is the primary "Savior" (see also Titus 1:3).

In every letter that Paul wrote, I believe without exception, Paul begins the letter invoking Jesus and God. For example:

Romans 1:1, 7-9: “Grace to you and peace from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ. First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all…”

Thus, from Paul's perspective, Jesus is God, the Logos of John 1:1. The apostles were not preaching about a historical Jesus but about Jesus preincarnated as God. Since Jesus, in Paul's view, was the resurrected Christ, there was no need to dwell on Jesus' earthly ministry.

Among the evidence that you purport is the silence in the letters written to Paul on Jesus as man and a distinction between secular (such as Tacitus) and non-secular writings (such as the Gospels). At least to me, neither point is especially convincing.

Paul was writing to work through theological issues informed by his Hellinistic background (like John) and the only fact that was important to him was that "Jesus died for our sins according to the scriptures(I Cor. 15:3)." For example, in the writings of Plato, even where he references Socrates as in the Apology, there is little biographical information except for the premise that Socrates lived; the emphasis is on the development of ideas. If Paul died between 64-67 AD, he would have certainly lived within the lifetimes of people that would have known Jesus, and perhaps he simply felt there was no need to expand on the obvious-- that Jesus lived. Akin to a stone dropped in a pond, Paul never saw the stone but he did feel the waves as they were just beining to radiate outward, effecting not just him but clearly many others. This begs the question as to what caused those waves-- the emergent belief in many more people than Paul. It could have been hysteria or delusion. But it seems just as likely if not more likely that it was the effect of a real person, namely Jesus, who died about thirty years before Paul was killed.

I don't buy the distinction you make between secular and non-secular writings. The book of Matthew, for example, was written between 50-100 AD, somewhat equivalent to us and the events of the Reagan to the Roosevelt presidencies. It was not written as history but as a testimony to key snapshots of Jesus' life, about no more than a month or so of his life. It was written with a point of view, as generally is all history ancient and modern. Even assuming that fables are weaved into the narrative by design or default, it is just as likely that cores of fact remain. The logical question before we dismiss the gospels is to ask not how are the gospels different but why are the gospels in general agreement. That the thrust of the narrative parallel each other suggests to me that the core factuality within the gospels are in at least some measure historically true.

Here are my summary conclusions on the question of the historical Jesus.

Did Jesus exist in the same way that we know that Abraham Lincoln existed? Or was Jesus a myth like Thor or Apollo? I raise this question to reassess for my own satisfaction what I have long assumed to be self-evident. The evidence convinces me that Jesus lived as a flesh-and-blood person. It is significant that few professional peer-reviewed historians challenge the factuality of the existence of Jesus, although I’m sure that there are some.

First, we have the record of the gospels and a small but significant part in Acts. These were written with a point of view, and in fact they only account in totality for about two months of Jesus’ life. But I believe that they are credible. They were written from about 50 to 100 AD, a relatively short time in a culture that had a strong oral tradition. By contrast, Caesar’s Gallic Wars date from 100-44 BC, but our earliest copy is from 900 AD. It would be the equivalent of writing about the events of the First World War—well within the memory of living people or their children. There are credible parallels between the gospels as well as confirmation of names of rulers and places that historians have unearthed.

Secondly, we have the testimony of perhaps a half dozen writers that were roughly the contemporary to Jesus and His apostles. External sources include Josephus, Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, and others. Some extra-canonical writings also provide us with insights. While some of these writings may be fictional, in totality there is enough to support the claim that Jesus lived. It is remarkable that a man of Jesus’ rank—a common carpenter—would have so much documentation.

Thirdly, we have the fact of the mass movement of Christianity that resulted in the replacement of the old gods of by Constantine the Great by the Edict of Milan in 313 AD. chose Christianity because of a vision of the Christian cross, but as a politician, I suspect he was counting noses as well. By this time, the emperor was aware of his Christian military officers and state officials as well of the popular appeal and moral force of Christianity in the face of persecution. Christianity, I believe, was a bottom-up movement. The political elite responded to the people rather than vice versa. Myths have sometimes created mass movements. But the most parsimonious and most likely explanation for this mass movement is that it started with one man who stands at the hinge of history—Jesus Christ.

My thinking on the gospels has done a lot of evolving over the years, but I've never believed that any of the writers was lying.

For most of my adult life, I thought they were just mistaken, that although much of what they wrote wasn't true, they thought it was. If you believe what you say, then you're not lying.

But are you prepared to apply the same standard to yourself? My sense is that you personally are honest. Or, to put it alternatively, I see no reason to think that you will consciously lie. Having said that, and without impugning your personal integrity, I do think that you are embracing a dishonest methodology in your search for historical truth, just as religionists of impeccable integrity nevertheless embrace a methodology to assert that the earth was created 6,000 years ago. There are people who wish to raise the bar into the clouds in testing whether or not Jesus is a myth because they hate Christianity, but their bias is cancelled out by Christian scientists who have lowered the bar so that it hits the ground because they want to prove that Genesis is fact. They are both intellectually bankrupt, although they may no know it.

What the creationists, those who assert that Jesus is myth, the revisionists who claimed that Auchwitcz was a spa, and the tobacco lobbists all have in common is a similar cast of mind that puts their conclusion before the data and cherry picks data to support their conclusion. That Jesus was a historical figure is not Xtian propaganda formented by the magisterium any more than the notion that all animals ascended frm a common ancestor is atheistic propaganda formented by the geology department of Columbia University. While it is true that the mass of the scholars can be wrong, it still behooves you to account for why this consensus exists in the face of two millennia of powerful anti-religionist voices who wish it did not exist.

A good test for intellectual honesty is to develop as strong a case as you can possibly develop contra to your hypnothesis, examine all the facts including in this case analogous documents from analogous figures during that time period, and then see if your theory is more compelling than orthodox scholarship. I doubt that the creation of a strawman and then its systematical dismantlement can prevail at any peer review no matter how much in sympathy those peers may be with your hypnothesis.

If you think my method fails to sort fact from fiction, then you can tell me what is wrong with my method.

By making, as do the creationists and the holocaust revisionists, doubt a fact. Here, for example, are arguments that go the other way:

http://www.tektonics.org/ntdocdef/gospdefhub.html#anon

"There are excellent reasons for maintaining the traditional ascriptions of Gospel authorship, when standard tests for such determinations are applied; There is no reason to date ANY of the Gospels later than 70 AD, although such dating may be permissible in the case of John; There is no reason to suppose that the Gospel authors took creative liberties with the events they recorded, to the point of fabrication."

Consider the question of attribution. If we assume that the Gospel of Matthew was written by someone or some people other than Matthew, then lets use the same standard to attribute Tacitus' Annals. Seems fair to me.

What if Pontius Pilate Had Pardoned Jesus?

What if Pontius Pilate had pardoned Jesus? Would Christianity exist?

I was in Costco's book section today waiting for some film to develop when I had came across a compilation of essays of alternative histories, sometimes based on the most subtle of cirumstances, that would have changed the course of world history. Often, these circumstances had to do with trivial circumstances-- a moment of indecision that saved George Washington's life early in the Revolutionary War from a soldier's bullet, for example.

I forget the historian who wrote the essay, but he made the case that Christianity may well have developed the way it did regardless of what most Christians think is the central fact of their faith-- Christ's death and resurrection. The counterfacts were that Pilate in defiance of the Jewish mob pardoned Jesus and Jesus went on to live until the age of 95 preaching, doing his miracles, and returning on occasion to Jerusalem to try to sacrifice himself in obedience to his Father's will. Jesus' pacifistic teachings and obedience to civil authority were condoned by the Roman Imperium and they became his protector. The missionary activities of Paul and his disciples spread the faith that was officially recognized by Constantine the Great around 300 AD.

Interesting,but possibly misleading.

Like all religions ,Christianity was a response to the needs of its society. It was and is a reflection of the societies in which it is found. That is one reason it has never been an homogenous belief system,regardless of claims by apologists. Had Jesus lived on,it is most likely he would have faded into obscurity. He was an very ordinary Jewish Rabbi. His actual teachings as far as I can tell, were Jewish,and meant for Jews. Initially,gentiles were not accepted by the followers of Jesus. The religion which developed into Christianity was invented almost entirely by Saul. It has very little do with Jesus.

Christianity contains no new moral code. The same code was taught by some Greek philosophers,in Hinduism by and by Siddhartha Gautama in the C7th BCE..In China The Dao and Confucian moral codes have many similarities with Christian moral values..Christianity contains no new theology or cosmology.Every single idea was taken from elswhere.

Until Constantine adopted Chrstianity,it seemed for that Mithraism might become the dominant religion insead of Christianity..The two religions have a lot of similarities.

Had Jesus lived,Mithraism may well have dominated the Roman Empire.That Christianity spread was more because it became the State Religion of the Roman Empire than any other single reason.Mithraism was an accepted mainstream religion until the C4th CE. It could easily have become the State religions instead of Chrsitianity--whether or not Jesus had survived.

Of course,that's the wonderful thing about alternate history.No one knows enough about affecting varaibles to be able to give more than a possibly entertaining guess.

Perhaps Christianity took root while competing cults such as Mithraism did not was because it was universalistic-- largely detaching ethics from tradition and legalism-- syncranistic-- absorbing ideas from other religions, especially Judiaism but probably other religions as well as you mention, and democratic-- appealing most especially to the marginal in society, which is necessary for creating any mass movement. The persecution the Christians suffered under Nero and other emperors also helped catalize the faith from a cult into a multinational religion by creating a future-based end-of-days narrative. The writings of Paul that effectively married Greek and Jewish thought and the very fact that the gospels and the epistles were made and preserved contributed to Christianity's early acceptance and growth, IMO.

I doubt that Constantine the Great simply by executive fiat made Christianity the official religion, for by that time the faith had penetrated all stratas of society, most particulary the officer corps, and like any good politician, he was responding to his constituency through identity politics.

This is one of those topics that can keep historians busy for years, since ther is no cut and dried answer. It seems to me to have been a combination of factors. Here are a few.

Once Paul had produced a version that did not require one to be or becoem a Jew, it was certainly open to all. Plenty of other cults were, though.

It developed a story that sounded very similar to many of the other religious stories going around, so it wasn't unaccepably bizarre.

Unlike the others, though, it had a one-way valve. Once you were a Xian, you were supposed to leave all the other cults alone.

I really have doubts about the Neronian persecution. Domitian seems to have been more interested in persecuting Jews. (Not surprising, since his father and elder brother were famous for winning the Jewish wars, while Domitian had to stay at home.)

Here's an interesting site about it.

http://users.drew.edu/ddoughty/Christianorigins/persecutions/index.html

"creating a future-based end-of-days narrative"

That seems to have been a part of Christianity from the beginning. Ehrman and others see Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet, and Paul expects the end in his own lifetime.

Woman's History

Well...

1) You aren't a woman.

2) Apparently an accurate representation of women's history/ rights really doesn't matter to you.

My giddy aunt. I hope you're not seriously suggesting that a correct understanding of "woman's history" is somehow a function of what kind of plumbing your body contains. I put the phrase "woman's history" in quotes because I'm not even sure what that means. I assume you are striving to distinguish women's history from "men's history" just as some people distinguish black history from white history or Irish history from British history. How about this revolutionary idea-- there is just history, of course imperfectly understood and interpreted, but there is no sacred set of facts that belong to one gender or another or one people or another. Such a notion is more the province of a religion than it is scholarship.