MayorofOysterville
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User ID: 3800
I'll grant you that an extremely early copy of gMark is very possible, but I don't think the same is true for Luke-Acts because of the details and purpose of those books. Luke-Acts is interesting because we can cross reference it with several other sources mainly Josephus and Paul to validate it's accuracy. And Luke gets several things wrong that we would expect an eyewitness and companion of Paul to get right. The most basic one being Paul's travel itinerary after his vision which Paul directly tells us about in Galatians. Additionally the author of Luke-Acts knows the Gospels as gLuke is one of the synoptics and essentially no one would say gLuke is the Earliest. It's an extremely tight timeline for the author of gLuke to be introduced to gMark or proto gMathew, after Paul has been sent to Rome but before his execution and as Paul was able to receive visitors and letter in Rome as stated in Acts and confirmed by Romans, it seems unlikely Paul would also not be introduced to one of these volumes.
The author of Luke-Acts is trying to ground his volume in history and does his best to set the the scene but when we look at Josephus there are some contradicting details. I think this enough to prove the author of gLuke wasn't basing his historical knowledge on Josephus but rather a shared understanding of the history being distorted by time. There a lot of hazy details and names that pop up in Acts especially the earlier part which indicate a half remembered history. This could be before Luke met with Paul and so the details are hazy but a lot of it directly concerns Paul and seems it would better match up with Paul's accounts of his exploits if Luke was his traveling companion. When I double checked some thing to write this post I found an intriguing book which argues both are true New Light on Luke by Barbara Shellard;
I shall take it as a working hypothesis for the following study, which accords with the admittedly scanty evidence, that Luke-Acts was written c. 100 CE, probably at Rome, even though the final revision of Acts may have been prevented by the death of the author, who would by then have been in his late sixties, and who was perhaps attached to the fringes of the Pauline mission in his youth...
An interesting hypothesis and I'm definitely going to check it out. But even if the "We documents" are much older and perhaps even first person accounts. I think the bulk of the work as enough correctable errors of an eye witness and contemporary of Paul that it's extremely unlikely to be contemporary. For example Acts criteria for apostleship excludes Paul, and as we can see in his letters Paul emphatically argued that he was an apostle. This seems unlikely for a follower of Paul to omit or write.
If so why does the author leave off the execution of Paul? Well for one gMark leaves out half of the resurrection so ancient authors are not obligated to write texts in a way we would expect. But also think of the audience of Luke-Acts, in my view Luke-Acts was intended for a Roman audience explaining how Christianity went from Judea to them by way of Paul. A big part of it is explaining why their Christianity came from Paul and not one of the apostles, and this is for a Roman audience. Luke-Acts overall is extremely deferential to Rome. The enemies in the book are usually unnamed mobs or Jews. Occasionally the local authorities hassle him but he's almost always able to get out of it by appealing to his Roman citizenship. And he has long friendly dialogues with the Roman rulers of Judea again in comparison to "the Jews" It doesn't stretch the imagination to see why an author appealing to an audience of Romans might end the narrative of Paul triumphantly preaching in Rome rather than his execution. As well as why the author of a sporadically persecuted movement might shave off inconvenient details the Roman authorities wouldn't like and would comfort parishioners. If we assume a post Jewish revolt date as well distancing themselves from the Jews might not seem a bad idea as well and a significant theme in Acts is Paul appealing to the Roman civil authorities against Jewish mobs. Him then being executed by Caesar ruins this narrative.
We can also see from the other Gospels that the author of Luke-Acts was perfectly comfortable editing out or omitting uncomfortable details. He has gone to great lengths to minimize the role of Jesus' family multiple mentions of his brothers and mother in gMark are removed or made non-specific. The narrative in Acts around the Jerusalem council gets incredibly weird and jerky because despite talking about the Church in Jerusalem he has neglected to mention James (the brother of the Lord) until now but can't get around his role in the council so has to add him in. He's working with known facts but weaving a narrative out of them. I actually think that Acts belongs more in the Romance genre ala Pseudo-Clement and I don't think this would be a controversial opinion among believing or secular scholars if it hadn't been canonized it's contradictions with Paul's letters and parallelism between Paul and Jesus would be enough to put it there, if it had been found in a cash of documents in the desert instead of all our Bibles.
Why then is it in all out Bibles? Well I think Acts serves a very useful purpose in Christianity narrative wise but particularly towards a Roman audience, and that is answering how did Christianity come to me?
If we assume an early date than Acts is attempting to chronicle "the story of Christianity up until now" and I just don't think it does that. We can see from Paul's letters that there was a lot of grappling with heresies differing interpretations and that a significant portion of his work was trying to keep early church's on the straight and narrow as he saw it. Even towards the end of his life in Philippians where we see these issues have not been solved and in Philippians especially he comes off rather bitter at points. All of that is omitted in Acts an Christianity is presented as a unified triumphal force with Paul going from town to town in the Roman gaining converts and ending with him preaching in the Empire's capital. This is very much a story of how Paul and Jesus triumphed. Paul's opponents are rarely heretics they are magicians and Jews. And the work of Luke-Acts but especially Acts again and again separates Christians from Jews and features the Roman authorities saving Paul from the Jews and learnedly listening to Paul's teaching on Christianity. Early differences are papered over and instead of denouncements, the have a council where they Holy Spirit moves them and the faith emerges stronger than ever! Which likely did happen to some degree but Philippians shows us it wasn't nearly as wholly agreed upon as portrayed in Acts. Acts works very well as a story of how did Christianity come to me a Roman citizen (or rather my grandfather) and why did it come from this Paul guy and it works very poorly as an exhaustive history of the early church which is not what it is trying to be, which is why I don't think an early date works at all for Luke-Acts.
MayorofOysterville
1d ago
I'm not arguing that. Just pointing out that women having no children isn't the actual problem.
MayorofOysterville
1d ago
Yeah I agree with that. I wish more right wing people wrote more theory the way the leftwing does. Progressives try all sorts of hairbrained schemes but so many conservatives just complain without trying to make a positive structure. Well it's better than it was but still not great.
MayorofOysterville
1d ago
When I said liberal republic I didn't mean a republic based on the Democratic party. Just some kind of open democracy. So far all "Red Caesar" candidates in the West have been elected and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
MayorofOysterville
1d ago
As far as I can tell yes. But he'd likely say that game theory would eliminated the rape gangs as women would choose to be "owned" and thus safe from the rape gangs that would target "unowned" women. Thus eliminating rape and thus creating utopia.
MayorofOysterville
1d ago
Yeah I really want to know this too. It'd be wild if he was 80 and still using terms like "facefag" on the internet.
MayorofOysterville
1d ago
I realize I failed to elaborate and probably should have cut that date or expanded on it. But my initial reason for using those decades specifically was that the US was still above TFR despite that.
MayorofOysterville
1d ago
I really disagree with that. I think most of Christendom, as in practicing believers, just want a republic with a more conservative baseline.
MayorofOysterville
1d ago
Modern media sure, but Indian media obviously has different standards. I can't say I particularly mind it, Indian movies like that are just over the top about everything. Adult cartoons in the West still have those but they've mainly fallen off. Blood diamond and Lord of War had pretty over the top depictions of Africa but movies set in African civil wars just aren't that common these days.
MayorofOysterville
1d ago
Conservatives mostly don't believe America is a Godless Empire and don't read stories about the CIA messing with opium those are liberal coded. Most of those conservative soldiers joined to fight terrorists or because the military was seen as a respectable career. Many have been disillusioned but that was after they signed the dotted line.
MayorofOysterville
1d ago
And that boneheaded approach will likely fail without buy in from the people. Multiple European monarchies tried throughout the 1800s and weren't able to manage it.
MayorofOysterville
1d ago
Nobody betrayed it the elite keep trucking trying to keep people trad and traditional even as society slips further and further from their grasp particularly in the cities. They all the political power but lack the cultural cache to keep the populace in line with their values and have had to basically abandon the democracy with trad guardrails Khomeini created because the vote is just going to go to the most liberal candidate.
A study would be interesting as the Gulf despite also having a conservative government had a population that remains conservative despite wealth and constant contact with more liberal foreigners. I suspect deep reasons of culture and status and maybe because they never had that liberal core. Once you do it seems it's pretty hard to put the genie back in the bottle. The Europeans tried for a hundred years after the French revolution and never managed it.
MayorofOysterville
1d ago
It's worth noting Dubai isn't that dependent on oil and has successfully diversified according to Wikipedia only 5% of Dubai's revenue comes from oil.
MayorofOysterville
1d ago
I feel like most RETVRN people don't really want anything more than a liberal republic with a more conservative culture most traditionally religious people in the US don't want anything more than that. The neoreactionaries do but they are small enough to be irrelevant and any attempt to create any non liberal society by them is going to run into the problem of who should be king and what the state church should be. The French monarchists once had a majority in parliament but supporting different dynasties.
MayorofOysterville
4d ago
Yes and I'm not arguing that's not a problem. There's a chance if we don't make our society pronatal we'll devolve back into the mud. However, it's less women not having kids and more women having a few kids.
Also you can insulate yourself from divorce pretty well if you too know what your doing. Marry after 27 and both have a college degree and divorce is somewhere around 15-20% You can insulate yourself from "divorce rape" by marrying a woman who works. It's not half your money if you earn about the same.
There's a big difference between women aren't having kids and women aren't having enough kids. According to those stats most women still have at least one child.
MayorofOysterville
4d ago
Jim doesn't want to go back to anytime. The level of control of women he wants has never existed in Western Christian society and the relief efforts of the Catholic church in South America during the 16th century would be intolerable churchianity to him. He wants contemporary Afghanistan not anything that's ever existed Christendom.
MayorofOysterville
4d ago
Yeah even ignoring all the murder the level of government control he want would be intolerable, in addition to micromanaging personal interaction I suspect the Jim party would wind up suppressing basically every Christian denomination as "heretical churchianity"
MayorofOysterville
4d ago
Very few for all those. The Houthis and Hezbollah are Shia who ISIS thinks are heretics that deserve to be brutally murdered and most recruits from Gaza just join Hamas and Hamas has few foreign fighters.
I agree with the general thrust though ISIS probably sucked a lot of people in who would have committed terrorist attacks in Europe.
MayorofOysterville
4d ago
So I read that article and am pretty unconvinced. For one a lot of nonwhites are already here and are thus neighbors according to Jim's reading if the parable. The other is most of the starving African children that Jim references are Christian and there's all sorts of stuff in the New Testament about helping brothers of the faith. I feel like Jim's Christianity is about as true to the text as Episcopalians which is to say they really really want to ignore the parts of the bible that conflict with their internal morality. He references the old testament genocides but all of those were towards pagans not towards believers.
My first reaction to this is but why though? Why do all that? (besides it being his sexual power fantasy) My second thought was does he actually have any kids himself because a lot of these guys don't.
But we had a much higher birthrate in living memory, in a society much similar to our own, so if you believe we need to urgently raise the birthrate as the number one priority it makes a lot more sense to implement something like the 1930s moral values rather than white shariah. And that's the other thing his call to RETVRN isn't even that. Western Christian society has never had rules like that and Northern Europeans have always had a degree of gender equality. Compare the number of premodern ruling queens in Europe to anywhere else, or the status of Viking women, or Medieval women or convents or another dozen examples. So he's actually trying to implement something that has never actually existed in Western society except among the FLDS I guess. Also there's a lot of evidence that it's more about rural life vs urban life than strict control of women. The 1860s USA or contemporary sub-Saharan both have a higher fertility rate than Saudi Arabia for example.
Speaking of society Jim could actually move to a society that shares his vision much of the Gulf have created a system like that with migrants serving at their pleasure and subjugated women. But he won't. He'll say it's cause he hates Arabs and Muslims but that's the problem he wants white ISIS to take over society and brutally murder everyone he hates but white ISIS doesn't exist and never did. It's telling that a lot of his commentators are Indians who do practice the kind of father arranged marriages he wants. Basically any white Christian conservative from any point in history would be pretty horrified at a lot of his ideas. And the vast majority of Republicans would as well. Contrary to Democratic party talking point most Republicans aren't motivated by extreme racism or sexism. So I don't think Jim's ideas of what the right wing should have much baring especially since he has different goals than the vast majority of conservatives and his preferred solutions seem to be more because he likes his solutions rather than their efficacy. I've skimmed through his blog and he has several failed predications (mostly about Ukraine) without an attempt to recalibrate, and just seems like a crank. He wants to "restore civilization" but his method for doing so is, take over society and kill everyone I don't like, which is what every barbarian everywhere does. He hates everyone, everyone is wrong except Jim. I wish he would at least have the decency to found a fringe political party which is what the extreme leftists who also, want to kill everyone that disagrees with them and force people to do the "right" things do. But as far as I can tell he's entirely alone and thus doesn't have to deal with other humans. For someone who wants a society heavily based on Christianity does he even go to church?
Also the way he talks about women makes me pretty uncomfortable I honestly just get the vibe he hates them. Not just because of wanting to reduce them to chattel (though also that) But I've never read so much talk of "wet pussy" in my life including in relation to pubescent children and Disney movies. It just seems incredibly vulgar for someone who wants to return use to traditional chaste society and no pious Christian man I know would talk like that.
I also think working with your hands can be a lot more satisfying it's what we designed to do after all. Sure a lot of farming is backbreaking especially during harvest season. But crafting, sewing, woodworking, fishing? These are all things people do voluntarily in their free time.
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