I'm a bit confused here. I self admittedly an extremely amateur history buff but my impression was that Greece had completely declined by 200 ce when they are claiming this papyrus originated from.
why would a text even exist at all on the subject of Christ from that Era in Greek. Wouldn't all of the relevant texts have been in Latin at that point?
honestly asking. I'm not supposing I have a good grasp on the history here.
>I'm a bit confused here. I self admittedly an extremely amateur history buff but my impression was that Greece had completely declined by 200 ce when they are claiming this papyrus originated from. why would a text even exist at all on the subject of Christ from that Era in Greek.
The New Testament was written in Greek ("The New Testament is a collection of Christian texts originally written in the Koine Greek language, at different times by various authors"). Heck, Paul's epistles were written to mostly Greek-side churches, addressed in Greek.
Furtherore, while Greece had declined as an "superpower" (basically Romans took over), Greek culture, communities, and the use of Greek language had not, and were prevalent in the Eastern part of the Empire, which later became the Eastern Roman Empire (known as Byzantium).
The Eastern empire used Latin at first as official language, but the common language of the majority of the population was Greek (which was also what was taught, and the language were literature and such was written).
This includes the old core ancient Greece (modern-day Greece, Asia Minor, southern Italy, Cyprus), and all the way around eastern mediteranean and the middle east - e.g. places like Alexandria, Antioch, etc. where Greek were spoken, and had big -and ruiling- Greek-speaking populations from the hellenistic times). Byzantium itself turned to use Greek as official language after 2-3 centuries (and kept it for another millenium).
Indeed, there is no evidence there was ever any New Testament text in Aramaic. Nothing in the Greek text hints at any sort of translation difficulty going from a Semitic to an Indo-European language.
Questions of whether Jesus, Matthew, Luke, et al ever even existed as live people arise. Again, there is no evidence of any kind to settle the matter. Serious historians, in its absence, lean toward "no". Many conclude that Christianity started out as a cult wholly based in Rome, that later identified a need for "people stories" set in someplace exotic to appeal to the laity.
> Again, there is no evidence of any kind to settle the matter. ...Many conclude that Christianity started out as a cult wholly based in Rome, that later identified a need for "people stories" set in someplace exotic to appeal to the laity.
There are sorts of clues. For instance, say that you and I both wrote a story set in your hometown. Assuming that your hometown isn't the same as mine, your story would have a much richer "backdrop", in terms of, say, the variety of place names.
Some evidence along these lines are presented in this video:
That its authors were familiar with geographical Palestine is evident, but that does not bear on events or existence of named individuals. And, of course, any of them could have existed without the events reported occcurring, just as we acknowledge GW without conceding his cherry tree. It all comes down to faith, the which historians are obliged to work without.
> ...but that does not bear on events or existence of named individuals.
Right, the logic of my post wasn't clear. I wasn't addressing whether there was evidence for the existence of Luke, but addressing the theory that "people stories" were made up in some exotic locale.
> That its authors were familiar with geographical Palestine is evident,
So what you're saying is that members of this cult from Rome:
1. Determined that their nice theory needed "people stories" (why?)
2. Determined that they needed to be placed in an exotic locale
3. Actually travelled and to Palestine and bummed around there long enough to be familiar with the geography -- and not just Jerusalem and some of the surrounding villages, but Galilee way up in the north, the Samaritan region in between, and so on.
It had been awhile since I watched that video; after posting it I watched it again, and it turns out these authors also bummed around long enough that the made-up names in these made-up stories just accidentally match up well statistically with the names that were common in Palestine at the alleged time of the events.
> It all comes down to faith, the which historians are obliged to work without.
This is just propaganda. I've listened to a number of audio books of history in the last few years, including a biography of Catherine Howard (5th wife of Henry VIII), the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and a history of Pompeii. All of them seem perfectly comfortable discussing a number of possible reconstructions given the facts at hand and giving a judgement of the plausibility of any of them.
"We don't have any evidence that a person named Luke existed" doesn't sound like the kind of thing those authors would say. It's not that huge of a deal theologically whether Luke existed or not; but my understanding is that there's no particular reason to doubt that he did.
So consider two hypotheses:
A. "There were guys named Matthew, Luke, Mark, and John who collected and wrote down reports collected from people who actually met some a Palestinian preacher named Joshua"
B. "People from some theology-heavy cult based in Rome lived in Palestine for a decade drinking in the culture so that their made-up stores would be more realistic."
Any neutral judge -- i.e., one who isn't starting out with the assumption that the events in the gospels are complete fabrications -- would say A is a lot more likely scenario than B. And if B really is the best alternate explanation people have been able to come up with, that lends an awful lot of credence to A, in my mind.
It is a fact that anybody could live somewhere, for example Palestine, for a year or a decade, and then at any later time encounter a reason to make up stories about events set there. That is the origin story of probably tens of thousands of novels, good and bad. I could recommend a few.
Thus, it strikes me as very weird to object to such a historical possibility (except on theological grounds, which are out of scope here).
You could reasonably object that the evidence would better place the origin of the cult in some other Roman city, such as Antioch or Alexandria, and I know of no evidentiary reason to prefer one over another. Romans did get around.
> It is a fact that anybody could live somewhere, for example Palestine, for a year or a decade, and then at any later time encounter a reason to make up stories about events set there.
Right, but we don't have just a single book by a single person. We have five books by four people, as well as loads of letters. Are you saying a single person from this cult made up this story, and then wrote it four different times? Are you saying four different people from this cult had all lived in Palestine, and decided to tell the same story four different ways? Are you saying one person made up the story and wrote it down, and three other guys came along and did their own version of it, but somehow managed to be accurate about names and places in spite of not having lived there?
None of these things are impossible; but in the absence of some actual evidence for this, they certainly seem less probable.
> Thus, it strikes me as very weird to object to such a historical possibility (except on theological grounds, which are out of scope here).
OK, so according to Wikipedia, the earliest copy of Luke that we have is titled, "The Gospel according to Luke"; dozens of references from early Christians refer to Luke as its author; and no source ever refers to the author as anyone else. But to you this is "no evidence that Luke existed".
But so far the only arguments you've made for your cult-retrofitted-exotic-backstory theory are "it could have happened".
I'm not the one judging theories differently based on my theological preferences.
One individual with direct experience of life in Palestine -- say, Paul -- suffices to write down a story with geographical details. As many people as you like may then crib from such a story. But we do know of more than one person who had lived in Palestine, in the period.
I do not judge theories. Historians judge, and report their results. As I understand the scenario, the theology came first, then the parables, then a person to quote parables from, and finally biographical accounts of that person's life, all unfolding over decades according to the needs of an expanding church.
I do not find anything implausible in their results, or in their reasoning. You are welcome to your own conclusions. If you have a problem with historians' results, you may take it up with them.
Please allow me to direct you to an active, ongoing history of refereed journals, academic chairs, and professional study which you may even see discussed at great length on Youtube, such as is cited in a sibling reply.
I'm not sure how "New Evidences the Gospels were Based on Eyewitness Accounts" would support your claim "whether Jesus, Matthew, Luke, et al ever even existed" and that Christianity started out as Roman cult.
Greek was the literate language of the Eastern Mediterranean during Roman times. Roman domination couldn't undo the existing network effects that preexisted there, all the more so that you couldn't be considered to have an education in Rome if you didn't speak Greek. Latin was used but it was essentially restricted to legal and administrative tasks.
I would also add that Greek was more philosophically sophisticated. The Greeks had a rich philosophical tradition and the resulting terminology was beyond what was available in other languages.
Even today, following centuries of scholasticism, the Latin translations aren't always adequate enough for the task. Take "logos" and "verbum", for example.
You can just use Greek words in Latin ! They certainly did often enough that it doesn't carry any prejudice. The declension system is very similar and Latin is by itself highly flexible, I wouldn't go as far as calling Greek particularly more sophisticated (and I'm usually very wary of assigning inherent qualities to languages). But it does carry along a cultural environment that's more focused on philosophy. You could say the same of Latin and law.
Haha, yes and no. This isn't really a question of the inherent grammatical qualities of languages in this case (though I don't see why certain languages can't perhaps be more suitable for certain kinds of discourse over others, but I digress). There's a received bit of wisdom in poetry that literature, strictly speaking, cannot be translated. This expression gets to the bottom of something very important which is that language is inseparable from culture and tradition (which you gesture toward in your reply).
So a word like "logos" simply has no equivalent in Latin and simply using the word "logos" or claiming that "verbum" is now the same as "logos" would require that either the receiver already know the Greek, or that Latin had become sophisticated enough to absorb the Greek meaning and all that it presupposes.
Every translation of John 1:1 seems equally as anemic as "verbum" or deficient in some way: word, Wort, słowo, Слово, parole, Verbo, 道. You need a sophisticated philosophical culture to support a word like "logos". Otherwise, there's nothing in your language to translate into.
The entire New Testament was originally written in Greek during the late 00’s/early 100’s. The papyrus mentioned in the article is a copy of Luke’s gospel dated to about 200 AD, but the original manuscript was written closer to 100 AD [0]. We have fragments of and references to the book of Luke from earlier than 200, but the copy from 200 is the first fragment containing the Lord’s Prayer and that unknown adjective.
The Septuagint (the Old Testament) was also in Greek, and translated around 200 BC, and was the official scriptures read in synagogues at the time. If they read scriptures in another local language in the synagogue, they were also required to read it from the Septuagint in Greek afterwards because that was the official language for scriptures in the synagogues. Only after Romans started persecuting the Christians did Jews start separating themselves and trying to put together a separate canon and translating it back into Hebrew, which wasn't accomplished until the 1400s.
Like Latin, Greek was a language whose use extended far past the decline of its birthplace. We do not have extensive contemporary sources for the Gospels. All we have are copies produced much later. This word is found in authoritative sources for the text of the new testament, which is written in Koine Greek.
> I self admittedly an extremely amateur history buff but my impression was that Greece had completely declined by 200 ce when they are claiming this papyrus originated from.
Koine Greek was the lingua franca of the Mediterranean. In the Middle East during that time Aramaic (the language that Jesus spoke) was the lingua franca, as was Persian further east. See The Last Lingua Franca by Nicholas Ostler for a history:
A language can survive the waning of the culture that it was associated with. For another example, see Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin, also by Ostler:
I wanted to add that Koine Greek was also the official language used in synagogues at the time, and that the Septuagint was the official version of the scriptures used in synagogues at the time of Christ. The scriptures could be read in Aramaic, but if they were read in Aramaic, it was also required that they be read in Greek afterwards.
If you happen to live in London or ever go there, you can see one of the oldest surviving New Testament Greek manuscripts. It's called Codex Sinaiticus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Sinaiticus), dates from the 4th century AD, and is always on free public display at the British Library in London.
why would a text even exist at all on the subject of Christ from that Era in Greek. Wouldn't all of the relevant texts have been in Latin at that point?
honestly asking. I'm not supposing I have a good grasp on the history here.