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I very much don't feel like a LARPer. I don't think Feser - one of the staunchest modern defenders of Scholastic Metaphysics - is a LARPer.
I also wouldn't describe myself as a Trad, because that means something very specific in my religious tradition. I attend a normal mass at a normal parish.
But I also 100% believe in all of it. Heaven, Hell, the way of Illumination, Theosis, Divine Simplicity, Trinity of Lover, Beloved, and the Love that Unites, submission to local bishop, souls that are the form of the body, demons, etc. These things are more real to me than the Declaration of Independence and I have had as much personal experience with the governance of the Church as the governance of my civil authorities.
I believe true freedom is the freedom that comes from discipline and learning how to work within a system outside of my experiences. The freedom of playing a piano well is not the same as pressing keys as the whim takes me. Enlightenment conceptions of freedom seem to me more like a toddler banging on a keyboard "freely."
I'm sure there are some LARPers somewhere, but there are still many people who were born into these traditions. If both mother and father or just father attended church weekly, their kids have a 1/3 likelihood of attending church weekly as well. Converts are a small group compared with those who are hereditary Christians.
Those who are Amish are already Amish. I don't know where the idea comes from that we will lose technological advances if we start having a more pre-modern outlook on usury, for instance. The rate of acquiring new advances might decrease, but some total collapse back to the bronze age isn't necessary or desired by anyone I'm aware of.
I agree with all this, and agree that we must believe in it to be seriously Christian. I suppose I'm more talking about forcing people to believe via authority - that is right out.
Unfortunately much of Christendom seems to want to return to the era when ecclesiastical authority was the rule, and to cross it was to risk death. I disagree that Christ would've wanted such a setup.
I'd like to push back on the idea that crossing ecclesiastical authority risked death. I feel like that's a model of the Middle Ages that is more conceived on 18th century propaganda instead of the actual historical record. Even when the Papal States had an executioner, he was part of the civil courts, not the ecclesiastical courts. He executed thieves and assassins, not heretics. Ecclesiastical courts were not allowed to kill anyone at all, and there is good reason for that. That's not to say they were infallible bastions of perfect goodness and mercy, but they aren't the opposite either. They were courts.
People accused by civil authorities of crimes begged to be tried by the Inquisition because the Inquisition had a higher standard of evidence. And so on and so forth.
What you might object to most strongly crosses over into the other aspect of your comment - forcing people to believe via authority. So I will touch on that first before a deeper discussion on persecuting heretics.
In the Middle Ages, people were not forced to believe via authority. Forced baptisms are illicit, and pagans converted in droves without threat of force. Rather, people believed because it was the air they breathed. Not being a Christian would be like being a Flat Earther today.
Taking the analogy further, lots of people today believe the Earth is round because that is how it is depicted in art. Maybe they were lucky enough to be exposed to a globe as a child. They heard stories and have seen relics of people going to space and seeing the round Earth. They are not forced to believe the Earth is round under threat of torture. It'd be frankly bizarre for them to think the Earth was Flat.
Any American today had the opportunity to take high-school level Trigonometry and be able to prove that the Earth is round based on measuring shadows and traveling 100 miles, a trivial feat compared to how difficult it would be to prove to oneself in the past. But why would they? Who is suspicious enough to do so?
And moreover, basic facts about the world, like the shape of the Earth, shouldn't be accessible only to those with above-average intelligence and a car. It would be bizarre to make a society that is agnostic about the shape of the Earth because we wouldn't want to unduly influence belief.
The Medieval mind was as convinced about the truth of Christianity as we are about the roundness of the Earth. Those with the intelligence to prove it made sure that this important knowledge was accessible to all. And I believe they did prove the existence of God and that there is more proof today than there was in the past. And that anyone smart enough who goes through 4-6 years of specialized education and spiritual formation (that is very hard to get these days) will agree, if we could just get them to take the opportunity cost to get there.
Here is where the analogy is inadequate - the problem of heretics. Because it doesn't really matter to a functioning society if there is a group of people who think the Earth is flat. We pity them, we ignore them, even if one of our own children became a flat Earther we would still harbor a vague hope that they could still life a good life, even if you stop trusting their judgement on other things.
But in the case of Christianity, there is a huge emphasis on Orthodoxy (right belief) and Orthopraxy (right practice.) And if you tip the balance so that the ignorant masses are now divided in belief, they are going to believe all sorts of things, very few of which are results of a systematic fact-finding methodology. And if you have midwits choosing beliefs randomly, you have disagreement and dissension and civil wars and that is why the CIVIL authorities executed heretics and waged crusades against them.
Because the Cathars had beliefs that were society-ending and spread them at an alarming rate to people who didn't know better. Because if you're a Protestant Lord and some of your subjects are Catholics then they have an obligation to defy your authority at times, and you can't have that.
The problem the Medieval were trying to solve wasn't that everyone is by default agnostic and they needed to be forced at knifepoint to be Catholic. The problem they were trying to solve is that people all too easily believe whatever their slightly-smarter neighbor tells them is a good idea and this can upend society. Like "marriage and sex are evil" and "men and women are interchangable."
But wait, didn't we enlightened Americans figure out a way for multiple people with a plurality of different ideologies and religions to live together in peace and harmony without society collapsing?
...I certainly hope so. But I think only time can tell.
This is disingenuous. Yes, the church generally didn't execute heretics however heresy was also a secular crime everywhere. This is like saying that judges never imprison anyone because they don't personally run prisons.
The standards of "truthness" in a manuscript society, pre-enlightenment society were just very different from our own, it was underpinned by authority. When books were very expensive you had to believe that if something was copied by everyone it was good and that the objection that you found had been addressed by someone somewhere, you had to be the one that was equivocated but you had no way to verify it.
Plenty of falsehoods that could be trivially proven false proliferated. The most important textbook of the middle ages, the etymologies of st. isidor, told you that diamonds were made soft by goat blood and garlic demagnetized magnets, mathematicians studied and believed the aristotelian cosmology despite it being incompatible with the ptolemaic model which they also knew and employed day to day or, for that matter, didn't match geographical knowledge (see for example Alighieri's Questio de Aqua et Terra) or even phisicians who believed in the existence of a rete mirabilis in humans and a spermatic duct connecting the brain to the penis (as Galen said, sperm is stored in the brain) despite presiding over cadaver dissections that had no such things.
I don't think you could convince many people today with medieval arguments because they went like this:
I wonder what we believe today that those in the future will find laughable.
If you checked out of scholarship in the 80s, I can see why you would think so. That is a less defensible sentiment today. Fifty years ago, people got away with saying that King David is a myth, now we have his coins. Excavations have revealed architecture described in the New Testament that has been hidden since the 2nd century. Where it gets hazy is where you would expect it to be hazy - what archaeological evidence would you expect the Exodus to leave behind? There is some evidence, nothing conclusive, but I wouldn't expect there to be given the short time length of the event and the amount of evidence nomadic peoples typically leave behind.
But that doesn't hold many problems for the Traditional Catholic, as the traditional view has viewed the Joshua and Conquest in an allegorical sense. Joshua as a Christ figure, demonstrates the importance of eradicating evil entirely and giving it no quarter. A large part of reading the Bible is knowing what the genre is of the book you're reading.
To the Christian claims, the important thing to get historically accurate is the Gospels, and the Gospels were written in the genre of Ancient Biography. They at least tried to get it right, and there is increasing evidence that they were written early and by eyewitnesses..
All attempts to date the Gospel after AD 70 rely in the logic of, "Well, we know Jesus wasn't God, so He can't have predicted the fall of the Temple ahead of time (never mind there were other people predicting the fall of the Temple in the decade leading up to it,) and so the Gospels all had to be written after AD 70." And dating the Gospels before AD 70 is more like, "The Gospels tell their readers to do things at the Temple, and that is a weird prescription if the Temple is already destroyed. And Acts leads up the climatic trial of Paul in Rome but doesn't cover it, which would seem to indicate that it was completed before his execution. And look here, and look there, at all these weird coincidences that only make sense if they were written in the 50s and 60s."
Which proof do you think relies on actual infinity being logically contradictory? St. Thomas famously believed we couldn't prove the universe was finite through just philosophy, and his Cosmological argument does not require the universe to have had a beginning. Maybe you're most exposed to Kalam's argument, which is impossible to defend on pure philosophical grounds, though people try to defend it still with a combo of scientific evidence and philosophy.
Cute, however the world is not 6000 years old, Moses is a probably a fictional character and certainly not the author of the Deuteronomy, there was no widespread captivity in Egypt, etc etc
That where one scholar is going but not where scholarship in general is going, that would be the other direction. And no eyewitnessess, whoever wrote the cleansing of the temple probably didn't even have a passing familiarity with the temple, for example.
It doesn't matter when the prediction was made, it's that predictions only become relevant after they become true, it wouldn't have been written about. But beyond that it's how it's treated, as inevitable rather than a menace. And beyond that it's the lack of references to the gospels from other sources, consider how many times the authentic letters of Paul could have quoted Jesus from the gospels but didn't. That means they were written after.
The offering to the Temple was a big part of jewish religion, rabbis continued to debate the proper temple practices for centuries after the temple was destroyed under the assumption that it would soon be rebuilt. It is no surprise that christians, which at that point were a jewish sect, would do the same.
You should re-read the last chapter of Acts:
All versions of the cosmological argument and all of the five ways of St. Thomas.
Irrelevant.
Are you getting that from Ehrman or somewhere else?
Even with a "late" gMark date of 73ish, the author would have been in the temple as all male Jews were expected to travel to the Temple several times a year. Assuming the writer is older than 18, he would have familiarity with the Temple before its fall.
If you don't discount scholars just for being religious, arguments for early dating is becoming more acceptable. The arguments make sense. They made sense when critical historian Adolf von Harnack did the math in 1911, and they still make sense today. The historical investigation has the fatal flaw of needing to presuppose that nothing supernatural happened. If you approach without that presupposition, then the evidence points elsewhere.
I would not dispute that the letters of Paul were mostly written without the Gospels as reference. There are some parts of Paul's letters that have a certain rhyme with the Gospels, particularly in 1 Corinthians. But I think they were written separately, which isn't exactly a bad thing from an evidentiary-stand point. All that tells us is that the Gospels were not wide-spread reference material at the time Paul was writing and perhaps he did not have access to copies himself. He was an wandering preacher/tent maker. It's not the weirdest thing for him not to have had an extensive library.
Or it mattered because it was a warning to the Christians to flee Jerusalem for the hills, which they did. And not all the predictions came true by AD 80. And some things that would probably be critical details embedded in their memory, like that the Temple was melted to SLAG wasn't mentioned at all.
Yeah, and then Paul died. He died during Nero's reign, in AD 64/65. He arrived in Rome in AD 60. Acts ends saying, "He spent two years in Rome preaching." Then there is a gap of another couple years, and then Paul died. If Paul died before Acts was written, Luke would have included Paul's dramatic death. He did not, because Paul's dramatic death didn't happen for another two years.
Since gLuke is likely written before Acts, and Acts was likely written before AD 65, and gMark was written before gLuke unless you're crazy, gMark is older than AD 65. Give them each a couple years to write each book, and gMark is in the late 50s. Paul's letters were written in the 50s and the part of the 60s where he was alive, which goes to your point that he didn't have a copy of a Gospel to reference. It's all very nice and neat like the truth tends to be.
No they don't. This is just silly. If for the sake of argument we allowed that there could be an infinitely long hierarchical series— D actualized by C, which is in turn actualized by B, which is in turn actualized by A, and so on in infinity, there would still have to be a source of causal power outside the series to impart causal power to the whole. Consider a mirror which reflects the image of a face present in another mirror, which in turn reflects the image of a face present in another, and so on ad infinitum. Even if we allowed that there could be such a series of mirrors, there would still have to be something outside this infinite series— the face itself—which could impart the content of the image without having to derive it. What there could not be is only mirror images and never any actual face.
The argument does not rely on the non-existence of actual infinity.
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;
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.
I'm not very sympathetic to what some consider contradictions between Galatians and Acts 9. It only seems to be a contradiction if you think each is supposed to include, step by step, everything Paul did right after his experience. But in the same source, Acts, you have two descriptions of the events internally, Acts 9 and Acts 22. It's clear that each depiction does not contain an exhaustive list of what Paul did immediately after his conversion. Instead, in Acts 9 we find phrasing like, "after days," and "after many days" leaving lots of room for Paul to make a trip.
Meanwhile, Acts has very detailed descriptions of Paul's travels and how long it took to get between each places, information that would be very hard to get without the author traveling from place to place themselves.
It's more like, gLuke is what Luke could gather about Jesus from those he talked to and Acts is the history of the people Luke spent time with - Peter, Priscilla and Aquila, and Paul.
Original gMark ended mid-sentence, which seems to me to indicate it was not finished because the author or scribe was interrupted. Acts has an ending, just one that places it before Paul's death. "And no one tried to stop him." That's just a lie if it is written after AD 70, and an obvious one. It definitely was written to a Roman (or Gentile more broadly) audience and the selection of what stories to include reflects that, but that does not mean it was faked.
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