Kooks and Quacks of the Roman Empire: A Look into the World of the Gospels

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- Tonyt
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Kooks and Quacks of the Roman Empire: A Look into the World of the Gospels
OP - April 25, 2012, 12:36 AM

I thought I would share with you guys one of my favorite articles:

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/kooks.html

The article is pretty funny. It describes the various other documented prophets, soothsayers, and con-artists that were contemporaneous with Jesus and highlights just how gullible the majority of people were back in those times.

Here's the intro paragraph:

Quote
We all have read the tales told of Jesus in the Gospels, but few people really have a good idea of their context. Yet it is quite enlightening to examine them against the background of the time and place in which they were written, and my goal here is to help you do just that. There is abundant evidence that these were times replete with kooks and quacks of all varieties, from sincere lunatics to ingenious frauds, even innocent men mistaken for divine, and there was no end to the fools and loons who would follow and praise them. Placed in this context, the gospels no longer seem to be so remarkable, and this leads us to an important fact: when the Gospels were written, skeptics and informed or critical minds were a small minority. Although the gullible, the credulous, and those ready to believe or exaggerate stories of the supernatural are still abundant today, they were much more common in antiquity, and taken far more seriously.

Enjoy.
- Zebedee
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Re: Kooks and Quacks of the Roman Empire: A Look into the World of the Gospels
Reply #1 - April 25, 2012, 04:08 PM

Well, this sounds absolutely brilliant. 'They, stupid and ignorant, we, smart and informed. End of.'
- Tonyt
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Re: Kooks and Quacks of the Roman Empire: A Look into the World of the Gospels
Reply #2 - April 25, 2012, 06:53 PM

Stupid certainly not! But ignorant certainly yes.

We should remember that in those times the boundaries of what was known as actual reality were very uncertain and vague. Only a very small portion of science and even of the visible world had yet been explored. So there were no principles established yet to mark the boundaries between the true and possible and the impossible and absurd. And as the article points out in the conclusion, this lack of knowledge of the physical world was confounded by a lack of communication technology, they had no newspapers, telephones, photographs, or public documents to consult to check a story. All they had was the man’s word that a story was true.

But that does not mean that they were stupid, in terms of practical knowledge on topics such as how to build a house or how to manage a farm with simple technology, even the least “educated” among them were most likely more knowledgeable than any of us typing at our computers. If you took someone from those times and put them on an abandoned island somewhere, they would have a much easier time at surviving than I would. They would know how to build a solid shelter out of the raw materials around them, they would know how to make tools useful for fishing, hunting or farming, etc.
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