Richard Dawkins Teaches the Children

Richard Dawkins Teaches the Children

In his latest book, Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide (Random House, 2019), Richard Dawkins sets out to give older children and teens an introduction to reasons to doubt religion. Unfortunately he manages to perpetuate a series of historical myths in the process and the book is characteristic of prominent New Atheists’ careless attitude toward history.

Outgrowing God

Most atheists come to that position more or less on their own. For me, being raised by a scientist in a family of scientists and engineers probably inclined me toward rational analysis of things from an early age. But apart from reading the cheekily sceptical newspaper columns of Australian treasure and public atheist Phillip Adams, I do not recall anyone greatly influencing my gradual unbelief. It was a high school class on comparative religion that gave me my lifelong interest in the origins of Christianity and I do remember reading up on the Problem of Evil, all of which led to some questioning and eventually to me becoming a fledgling atheist by the end of my teens. Certainly none of my teachers or lecturers, several of whom were themselves atheists, did anything more than encourage me to think and question and show me how to research and structure my arguments. Essentially, I worked it out for myself.

The luminaries of the New Atheism, however, think “religion poisons everything” and that the world would be a much better place with less of it. Preferably, none. So they tend to be rather more evangelical than the hands-off guides and mentors of my youth. Peter Boghossian, author of A Manual for Creating Atheists (Pitchstone, 2013) certainly does not believe that people can be left to come to their own conclusions and proposes active “street epistemologists” who take every opportunity to “to talk people out of faith and into reason”. This seems very high minded in theory, but in practice it sounds as though Boghossian’s minions would be more annoying than effective. Most evangelists are, after all.

Dawkins appears to have adopted the strategy of “get them while they’re young” – a version of the Jesuits’ Aristotelian principle of “give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man”. Unfortunately Dawkins cannot actually apply that idea, since he thinks the indoctrination of children is a form of child abuse, so Outgrowing God seems to be pitched at young people who are slightly older – an early teenaged audience, judging from the tone of the writing and the level of his arguments. This places some constraints on the writer, since that audience means nuanced discussion has to give way to generalisations in many cases.

So some of Dawkins’ claims could be disputed and alternatives could be presented, but he is trying to present generally accepted scholarly views, presumably allowing his young audience to sort out the subtleties and controversies later on. Fair enough. However, it is not his generalisations that are the problem with this book. It is the errors. And when it comes to history (I will leave any errors regarding theology, philosophy and science to others), there are many and they indicate – yet again – a decidedly sloppy approach on the part of an author who the book’s blurbs trumpet loudly as “one of our greatest explainers, thinkers and writers”.

Dawkins

Dawkins’ book has two parts: “Goodbye God”, which leads the young reader to question the idea of God by presenting it as just another among many ancient myths, and “Evolution and beyond”, which presents science as a sure alternative to religion. This is essentially a distilled form of Dawkins’ whole, rather simplistic, attitude to the subject. For him, religion was and is little more than a failed attempt to do what science does better – explaining the world and how it works. His brisk assessment is that all one has to do is realise that religion is simply silly mythology, riddled with errors and misunderstandings, and then grasp that science does the job far better. Then you abandon God, embrace science and live happily ever after. Simple.

Of course, this ignores the fact that religions have never been only about explaining the world and how it works and provide all kinds of other utility: ethical frameworks, sources of meaning, transcendental experiences, social networks, psychological supports etc. This is why, to the bewilderment of people like Dawkins, religion has survived the rise of science and, despite repeated rumours of its imminent demise, seems set to continue for quite some time.

For Dawkins, this can only be because not enough people have grasped how silly it is and how much better science is. Intelligent people who take it seriously are just imagining the naked emperor is clothed and so deluding themselves. And those who reconcile science with their religious beliefs are merely accommodating its silliness and just need to wake up to themselves. For Dawkins, all religion is effectively at the level of the dumber forms of evangelical fundamentalist Christianity; it is just that some other forms are better at hiding it. So his message to his teenaged readers is that religion is just stupid myths and they should embrace science because it is factual. The end.

In his presentation of this simplistic thesis, however, Dawkins stumbles over quite a few “facts” of history.

Constantine and Nicaea

Dawkins does not get off to a very spectacular start when, in the book’s opening argument about the great variety of gods, he confidently informs his readers that the modern dominance of variations of Yahweh among all the gods worshipped in history is easily explained:

It’s a historical accident – the adoption of Christianity as the Roman Empire’s official religion by the Emperor Constantine in AD 312 – that led to Yahweh’s being worshipped around the world today.

The idea that it was Constantine who made Christianity the official religion of the Empire is a persistent myth and one derived from a long and largely Protestant theological tradition. Early Protestantism saw itself as returning to the original form of Christianity and reviving the true form of the early faith that had been warped by the Catholic Church over the centuries. This led to the adoption of a version of Church history that traced the rise of Catholicism to a devil’s bargain the Church made with the wicked Constantine. In return for an end to persecution and access to political power, the Church allowed itself to be subsumed into the Roman Empire’s apparatus by a scheming emperor and so lost its previous purity and integrity.

This is a distortion of history. Constantine’s conversion gives every indication of being sincere, even if the sophistication of his Christian belief was initially very low. Far from giving him some great political advantage, his conversion to a minority sect made up mainly of the lower classes did not endear him to the substantially pagan Senatorial and equestrian classes, which were the core of political power in the Empire. It was the loyalty to him of the Army and his ability to ruthlessly eliminate rivals that secured him ultimate power, but this was despite his strange new religion, not because of it. And as Christianity slowly but exponentially increased its numbers in the Empire, it increasingly conformed to the society in which it grew, with its outsider and radical status gradually declining. Christianity was already becoming a Roman imperial faith and Constantine’s adoption of it was as much a reflection of this as a catalyst for its acceleration.

But in the Protestant tradition Constantine is the villain of the story of how the Church lost its way and the myth that he made Christianity the official religion of the Empire, shackling the faith to the Whore of Babylon, is persistent as a result. In fact, Constantine was clearly aware that his new religion was not popular among some key political factions and trod lightly around the matter. His policy extended the previous edict of Galerius of 311, which gave Christianity a reprieve from persecution in return for prayers “to their God for our safety, for that of the republic, and for their own, that the commonwealth may continue uninjured on every side”. In 313, Constantine and his then co-emperor Licinius revived this edict in opposition to the renewed persecution of Christians of the rival emperor in the east, Maximinus Daia, and so ordered the release of Christians who had been imprisoned or enslaved and the return of confiscated Christian property. Constantine and Licinius extended this religious liberty to all cults and sects, not just Christianity.

Once he became sole emperor in 324 his policy of general religious toleration became firmly established. He certainly favoured and acted as a generous patron of Christianity, but he did not impose it on the Empire. Obviously the adoption of Christianity by Constantine and almost all of his successors had an impact on the growth of the once marginal sect, but Christianity was already growing exponentially and is likely to have dominated the Empire demographically by the end of the fourth century anyway. The slow transition from the largely pagan Empire he inherited to the point where Christianity was the dominant and majority faith occurred over the next one or two generations and Christianity was not declared to be the sole official public religion until the Edict of Thessalonica, jointly issued by Theodosius I, Gratian, and Valentinian II on 27 February 380. This was 43 years after Constantine died.

But Dawkins is so enamoured with this erroneous idea that he repeats it twice more in the book. The fact that Dawkins could get something so basic wrong in this book’s opening pages is an indication of his laziness when it comes to history. He clearly did not bother to check this “fact” that he repeats several times – less than a second on Google would have informed him it was wrong. Like many anti-theist polemicists, if a historical idea he has heard somewhere suits his argument, it will do. No checking necessary. So much for a steely rationalist adherence to “facts”.

So it is no surprise that the sloppy work continues with another myth about Constantine: the claim he created the canon of the Bible at the Council of Nicea:

The canon was largely fixed in AD 325 by a conference of church leaders called the Council of Nicaea, set up by the Roman Emperor Constantine – the one whose conversion led to Europe becoming Christian. He made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.

Dawkins loves this myth so much that he repeats it no less than seven times in his short book. But, again, it is total nonsense. Not only was the canon not “largely” set at Nicaea, it was not even discussed at that council. As I have detailed here before (see The Great Myths 4: Constantine, Nicea and the Bible) this myth can be traced to a quip by Voltaire and has been perpetuated in popular culture ever since. The idea that the Bible was actually selected by a committee presided over by a scheming emperor and that many texts were excluded from it on the whim of Constantine is too delicious for some to resist. It is one of the various “facts” that are not facts presented as “history” to millions of unsuspecting readers in The Da Vinci Code (2003), but we should expect Dawkins, as one of our “greatest thinkers and writers”, to do his homework a little better than the lowbrow airport novelist, Dan Brown.

In fact, the process of the canon’s development was all but complete long before Constantine was even born and he had pretty much nothing to do with it. Not only was it not even discussed at the Council of Nicaea, but the first time it was discussed in any council at all was at the local synod at Hippo in 393 AD; that is 56 years after Constantine died. It was not discussed by a full ecumenical council until the Council of Trent in 1546: a whole 1209 years after Constantine’s death. Dawkins has bungled basic history again. 

Jesus reads the Bible?

“Fifty Gospels”?

But, once more, Dawkins is not interested in checking what he is claiming because this factoid suits his agenda perfectly. His book’s second chapter is entitled “But is it true?” and aims to get his young readers to question the veracity of the Bible. He gives a bald summary of the origins of the New Testament texts, with heavy emphasis on how little they can reliably tell us about Jesus. Then he returns to the issue of the canon and his nonsense about the Council of Nicaea:

As I said, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were only four out of a large number of gospels doing the rounds at the time of the Council of Nicaea. I’ll come on to some of the lesser-known gospels in a moment. Any of them could have been included in the canon, but for various reasons none of them made it. Often it was because they were judged heretical, which just means they said things at odds with the ‘orthodox’ beliefs of council members. Partly it was because they were written slightly more recently than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But, as we’ve seen, even Mark wasn’t written early enough to be potentially reliable history.

This is a remarkable distortion of what happened. Leaving aside the fact “the Council” deciding on the canon is pseudo historical fantasy, the Christian scholars who examined and debated which texts were worth using in the long process of the development of the canon from the later second century to the mid fifth century were not actually idiots. This is borne out by the fact that they arrived at a selection of four gospels which even the most sceptical modern scholars agree are, in fact, the earliest, the closest to the ideas of the first generations of the Jesus Sect and, overall, the most likely to preserve actual historical traditions. This was thanks to their application of principles which they had inherited from the Greek philosophical tradition, which already had centuries of experience in sorting original authoritative texts from later pretenders and pseudepigraphical frauds.

Dawkins tries to downplay the idea that later gospels were somehow any less legitimate than the canonical ones by saying they “written slightly more recently”, but in most cases the difference is substantial and not “slight” at all. A couple of non-canonical gospels – Thomas or Peter, perhaps – could be said to be written around the same time as the later canonical ones, but most are much later. Most of them date to the mid to late second century, which makes them a whole century after gMark. This is not “slightly more recently”.

But, warming to his theme, Dawkins claims that the method of selecting just four gospels had little to no logical basis at all:

Irenaeus …. was convinced that there had to be four gospels, no more and no fewer. He pointed out (as though it mattered) that there are four corners of the earth and four winds. As if that wasn’t enough, he also pointed out that the Book of Revelation refers to God’s throne being borne by four creatures with four faces. This seems to have been inspired by the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel, who dreamed of four creatures coming out of a whirlwind, each one of which had four faces. Four, four, four, four, you can’t get away from four, we obviously have to have four gospels in the canon! I’m sorry to say that’s the kind of ‘reasoning’ that passes for logic in theology.

As alien as this kind of ancient thinking based on symbolism and symmetry seems to us, we are talking about a culture permeated with the idea that the world was a reflection of the divine. But the key point here is that Irenaeus is making a post facto argument. He is justifying the already well-established preference for the canonical gospels and finding symbolic resonances and parallels for them, not using this fourfold symmetry as a primary argument for these four books.

What Dawkins does not seem to understand from his clearly very light reading on the matter, is that the debates about the canon barely involved the gospels at all. With the exception of that of Marcion, all canonical lists and references we have from the second century onward include all the canonical gospels and none of them even consider any other gospels. The debated texts were all lesser epistles or works like The Shepherd of Hermas or a couple of apocalyptic texts, including Revelation. The idea that a large number of Christian scholars were paying a lot of attention to the Gospel of Judas and considered it on the same level as the canonical gospels but were thwarted by the Council of Nicaea because of Irenaeus’ four winds symbolism is a cute little story, but total nonsense.

But Dawkins does not let small things like facts get in the way of his arguments once he has the bit between his teeth. His teenaged audience is assured that there was effectively no difference between the gospel attributed to Mark and the one attributed to Judas – a text he places great emphasis on in this section of the book and which he erroneously claims “was probably nearly as old as the four canonical gospels”. It is actually much more likely to be about a century later than them.

He also claims his fantasy “Council” selected their four gospels from a plethora of “extra gospels, about fifty of them”. This bizarre exaggeration is, I suppose, slightly better than the “more than eighty gospels” supposedly considered in the equally silly account in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, but it is still total nonsense. In fact, we have copies, fragments of or references to perhaps 14 to 18 other gospels, not “about fifty”. Where Dawkins is getting this nonsense is anyone’s guess [Edit – see note below], but he appears to be doing no more than repeating stuff that has simply appealed to him because it suits his argument. There is little to no sign of any actual research here.

The stupid thing about his bungling of the history here is that, if he had bothered to do some actual research, he could have told the real story of how the Christian Bible came to be. It would not have the same level of “gotcha” impact as his Dan Brown-style fantasy, but it would still have informed his young audience that the Bible did not arrive from heaven on a gold cushion and that it actually developed from a long and entirely fallible human process – one that got some things right (e.g. selecting the four oldest gospels) and many things wrong (e.g. accepting as genuine a number of texts we now recognise as pseudepigraphical imposters). Properly handled, this genuine story of competing versions of Christianity struggling for dominance over 250 years and the selection and rejection of texts in this tumultuous context could still make a thoughtful teenager carefully reconsider how they see “the Good Book”. And it would have an added advantage that Dawkins’ clumsy pseudo historical nonsense does not have: it would actually be factual.

If Dawkins was better at history, his book would serve his purposes better. But he does not care enough to get things right. Accuracy is not the point, landing punches is.

Annunciation

Like a Virgin

After making a clumsy mess of how the canon came to be and why some books were chose over others, Dawkins makes a similar hash of criticising the reliability of the gospels. Someone who actually took the time to understand this issue could easily make the point Dawkins is trying to make – “you cannot take the gospels as documentary histories” – and do so with careful reference to critical scholarship. But Dawkins seems incapable of anything above the level of sneering internet atheist tropes.

He begins:

The long gap between Jesus’s death and the gospels being written gives us one reason to doubt that they are a reliable guide to history. Another is that they contradict each other.

This is a reasonable start and he proceeds by noting well-known contradictions in the list of the names of the twelve disciples or in the genealogies in gMatt and gLuke’ infancy narratives. A better guide could have used this to get his young readers to think about how these contradictions could have arisen, what they tell us about the transition from oral traditions to literary ones and whether the gospel writers were intending to write what we think of as history at all. But Dawkins does not seem to know about any of this and certainly does not care. His bald analysis does not rise much above “contradictions = wrong!”

His analysis of how prophecies shape the gospel narratives is similarly ham-fisted.

Yet another problem with taking the gospels as historical truth is their obsession with fulfilling Old Testament prophecies. Especially Matthew. You get the feeling Matthew was quite capable of inventing an incident and writing it into his gospel, simply in order to make a prophecy come true. The most glaring example is his invention of the legend that Mary was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus.

That gMatt is full of elements which seem wholly derived from Jewish scriptures seen as Messianic prophecies or pressed into service as such by the writer is pretty clear. But to Dawkins, this simply means the gMatt writer is just making things up “without a hint of shame”. He does not contemplate that, perhaps, both the gospel writer and his audience knew exactly what he was doing and that these elements were not meant to be read literally as historical.

That aside, Dawkins’ bold claim that the idea of the Virgin Birth is “[Matthew’s] invention” ignores the fact that the story of Mary’s virginity is also told independently in gLuke. So clearly it predated both these gospels and was not “invented” by the gMatt writer. Dawkins also has a internet atheist’s weak grasp of how Jewish exegesis works. He notes that gMatt refers to Isaiah 7:14 as a prophecy of Jesus’ birth to a virgin, but he then argues:

Matthew totally misunderstood the prophecy. …. it’s clear from the Book of Isaiah itself – though apparently not to Matthew – that Isaiah was talking not about the distant future, but about the immediate future in his own time. He was talking to the king, Ahaz, about a particular young woman in their presence, who was pregnant even as he spoke.

In fact, the writer of gMatt would have been very aware of the context of the Isaiah text he uses. What Dawkins does not seem to understand is that exegesis of this kind involves taking a text out of its context and highlighting a second meaning for it. So, for the gMatt author, Isaiah 7:14 had one meaning in its context, but a second and different meaning on its own. Of course, the point could still be made that much of the use of this exegesis in the gospels means at least some of the episodes it supports are of dubious historicity, but Dawkins does not seem to know anything much about the subject or too care to learn.

So he bumbles on with another piece of stock village atheist fare:

The word Matthew quoted as ‘virgin’ was almah in Isaiah’s Hebrew. Almah can mean virgin; but it can also mean ‘young woman’ – rather like the English word ‘maiden’, which has both meanings. When Isaiah’s Hebrew was translated into Greek in the version of the Old Testament called the Septuagint, which Matthew would have read, almah became parthenos – which really does mean ‘virgin’. A simple translation error spawned the entire worldwide myth of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the Roman Catholic cult of Mary as a kind of goddess, the ‘Queen of Heaven’.

So it is all just a “simple translation error”! Unfortunately this neat story does not quite work. The translators of the Septuagint were not exactly morons and were very careful to reflect the Hebrew they were translating as closely as they could, though translating from a Semitic language (Hebrew) into an Indo-European one (Greek) was often tricky. Παρθένος (parthenos) certainly meant virgin, but was often applied to any young woman of marriageable age (since they were meant to be virgins). So this was actually a perfectly acceptable word to translate the Hebrew almah.

Exactly how the concept of Mary giving birth as a virgin arose is not clear. It may be that it did come from reading the Greek version of Isaiah 7:14 very literally, so long as that text was already seen as a Messianic prophecy. Judaism had a long tradition of prophets or other holy men who were conceived miraculously by someone who, strictly speaking, should not have been able to conceive, so the infancy stories of Isaac, Samuel and Samson all involve a mother who was either known to be infertile or who was already past menopause. The story of Jesus’ miraculous conception falls into this tradition, though in this case its a virgin who miraculously conceives. So did this prophetic tradition attach itself to Jesus first, with Isaiah 7:14 pressed into service to support it later, or was it the other way around? It is impossible to tell. But Dawkins’ “gotcha” story is not going to help his audience even begin to ask this kind of question, because he simply does not know what he is talking about.

Dawkins’ grasp of things does not improve in his chapter on the Old Testament, which he titles “Myths and how they start”. For example, he tries to highlight the parallels between the Noah story in Genesis and Babylonian analogues that tell versions of the same story. But, again, he makes a total mess of it.

He begins by noting “Noah story comes directly from a Babylonian myth, the legend of Utnapishtim”, but then he declares that the “Utnapishtim story … comes from the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh”. This is wrong. The only version of the Gilgamesh story that contains a flood is the one in Akkadian – that is Babylonian, not Sumerian. There are earlier Sumerian stories about Gilgamesh, but they do not include any flood. And there is a Great Flood story in Sumerian, but it does not involve Gilgamesh.

He then claims his supposedly “Sumerian” Epic of Gilgamesh “was written two thousand years earlier than the Noah story”. In fact, the actually Akkadian Epic was written less than 1000 years earlier. Dawkins also bungles multiple other elements in this section. In an entertaining thread on Twitter, Cambridge Assyriology post-grad George Heath-White skewers Dawkins over these and other bungles, including mixing up the animals in the Gilgamesh and Genesis stories, and claiming that the Sumerian flood legend, like the story of Noah’s Ark, ends with a rainbow. It does not. Heath-White also managed to track down where Dawkins did his “research” and so how he managed to get everything so wrong. It appears this “great explainer, thinker and writer” cribbed all this error-laden stuff from a crappy little website called HistoryWiz.com, complete with broken links, graphics that do not load and a quaintly 1990s feel. To call this “shoddy” would be a compliment.

Scientists Try History

But the whole book has this distinctly slapdash feel – as though it was written in a hurry, largely from half-remembered stuff that Dawkins recalls reading somewhere, with little to no actual research or even basic fact-checking and a polemical drive that overrides everything else. He manages to grudgingly admit Jesus most likely existed, but says:

But how much do we really know about Jesus? Can we be sure he even existed? Most, though not all, modern scholars think he probably did.

Dawkins should be familiar with how Creationists make similar statements that “not all” scientists accept evolution, skipping around the fact that “not all” really means “actually, almost all except a tiny few contrarians (many of whom have overwhelming ideological biases)”. Which is what “not all” means in Dawkins’ sentence as well, though his young readers are unlikely to realise this and he does nothing to assist them.

He flirts with Jesus Mythicism or makes Mythicism-adjacent comments elsewhere in the book as well. In his opening section he asks:

How do we know Julius Caesar existed? Or William the Conqueror? No eye-witnesses survive; and even eye-witnesses can be surprisingly unreliable, as any police officer collecting statements will tell you. We know that Caesar and William existed, because archaeologists have found tell-tale relics and because there’s lots of confirmation from documents written when they were alive. But when the only evidence for an event or person wasn’t written down until decades or centuries after the death of any witnesses, historians get suspicious.

Of course, here Dawkins is trying to get across the idea that the Bible cannot be taken at face value, but historians do not “get suspicious” about sources which are “decades or centuries after the death of any witnesses”. Or rather, they are “suspicious” (i.e. critical) of any and all sources, regardless of when they are written, and may or may not place weight on sources for a whole range of reasons, the date of composition just being one of them. His claim that non-contemporaneous sources are immediately “suspicious” echoes the weird online Myther fetish about the lack of contemporary sources for Jesus.

He goes on to assure his readers that ‘[a]nother thing that worries historians is that there are hardly any mentions of Jesus in histories outside the gospels”. Actually, historians are not “worried” about this at all, given that they would not expect there to be many more such mentions than we have for analogous Jewish preachers, prophets and Messianic claimants of the time. And, in fact, we have more such mentions for Jesus than we have for any other such Jewish figure. But here Dawkins works to dismiss at least one of those mentions. He quotes the Testimonium Flavianum in Josephus AJ XVIII.63-4, introducing it by saying “Josephus had only this to say” and then noting:

Many historians suspect this passage is a forgery, stuck in later by a Christian writer. The most suspicious phrase is ‘He was the Messiah.’ …. He wouldn’t have just dropped in a casual ‘He was the Messiah’. It does sound very like a later Christian forgery. That’s certainly what most scholars now believe.

It is unclear whether Dawkins is saying most scholars believe the “He was the Messiah” element is a later interpolation or if he is claiming most scholars think the whole passage is a forgery. The former claim is correct. The second is not. Intentionally or not, he definitely gives the strong impression that the whole passage can be dismissed and gives no indication he even knows that most scholars consider it to be partially authentic (see Jesus Mythicism 7: Josephus, Jesus and the ‘Testimonium Flavianum’).

He also says that Josephus’ work has “only” this to say about Jesus, so it appears he is – like many internet atheists – totally unaware of the second reference to Jesus in Josephus – AJ XX.200 – which almost all scholars regard as authentic.

He does a better job on the Tacitus reference to Jesus in Annals XV.44; noting its hostile tone as good evidence that it is not a Christian addition (“No later insertion by Christians here!”), but he finishes the point with another note that the “balance of probability, according to most but not all scholars, suggests that Jesus did exist.” This includes another Creationist-style “not all” thrown in for polemical effect.

The whole book has the tone of thoughts by someone who has not read widely on any of the historical topics, and certainly nothing much beyond second-hand and endlessly repeated tropes and books by friends and people he likes. Dawkins’ wife, the actress Lalla Ward, read the audiobook version of Catherine Nixey’s execrable The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (2017), despite it being a distorted caricature of history and slammed as rubbish by actual historians. So it is not surprising that Nixey gets a nod in one of Dawkins’ very few footnotes, supporting his reference to “the manic determination of the early Christians to destroy images of rival gods”.

Dawkins also cites “my friend the psychologist Steven Pinker” and his doorstop of a book The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), saying:

He shows how, over the centuries, over the millennia, we humans have been getting nicer, gentler, less violent, less cruel. The change has nothing to do with genetic evolution and nothing to do with religion. Whatever is ‘in the air’ has been moving in what we can broadly see as the same direction from century to century.

Dawkins makes no secret that he is a fan of his friend’s book. A couple of years after its publication he gushed about it on Twitter:

Dawkins Pinker tweet

The answer to his sneering question about “why it took a scientist to write it” is “because no historian would bungle the history in it so badly”. Pinker’s errors, dubious and creative historical “statistics” and general playing fast and loose with history to make it fit an ideological agenda may have to wait for a future article here. In the meantime the scrupulous history blogger, Spencer Alexander McDaniel, does an admirable job of skewering Pinker in his detailed critique – see Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature” Debunked on McDaniel’s highly recommended Tales of Times Forgotten blog.

The problem here is not that Dawkins just gets a few things wrong about history. He is a scientist, not a historian, many popular writers bungle bits of history and even historians get things wrong when talking about periods or topics outside of their specialisation. But Dawkins is making a plea for relying on facts over beliefs, for questioning things you may like to believe and for checking things you have simply been told. Yet his book is riddled with evidence that he does not practice what he preaches. His mistakes are many and they are not minor – some of them are absolute howlers. And it is not as though he needed to spend days buried in dusty monographs to check them. A few moments on Wikipedia would have told him his claims about Nicaea were dead wrong. The fact that historywiz.com looks and reads like it was written by a high school student in the 90s should have been enough to make him question its validity as a source. And surely he has enough learned friends from Oxford who he could have asked to check his claims about the New Testament or Josephus.

But it appears Dawkins does not actually care about facts when it comes to history. As Nathan Johnstone has noted in his critique of New Atheist historiography, Dawkins and his cohorts do not see history as something worth truly understanding. They see it – or their garbled version of it – as a quarry for stones they can hurl at their religious opponents. Dawkins clearly did not even think to check the things he says about history. Like all hidebound zealots, he already knows he is right. Which, given the topic of his little book for teens, is richly ironic.

Edit 28/11/20 – I keep seeing variants on this “fifty gospels” claim and so decided there must be some influential, if mistaken, source as its point of origin. It actually did not take long to track down. I regularly find that these often-repeated myths can be traced back to a eighteenth or nineteenth century “free thinker” or anti-clerical book and have then been repeated as “facts” ever since. Many of the myths I debunk on History for Atheists have their origin in Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) – the ones about the burning of the Great Library, for example, or the murder of Hypatia. Voltaire is another common source of these myths. As noted above, a quip he made about the selection of gospels seems to be the source of the fiction that the canon of the New Testament was decided at the Council of Nicaea.

So it is not too surprising to find he seems to be the source of the “fifty gospels” claim. “Voltaire” was the pen-name of François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778), the French wit, philosopher and critic of Christianity. He gives a sceptical potted history of Christianity in Volume 3 of his Dictionnaire philosophique (1752) based on the understandings of the time. It reads rather quaintly now, but was positively (and deliberately) scandalous in 1752.

In it he talks about the way early Christianity fractured into competing sects in its first centuries and says:

The different flocks of this great rising society could not, it is true, agree among themselves. Fifty-four societies had fifty-four different gospels; all secret, like their mysteries; all unknown to the Gentiles, who never saw our four canonical gospels until the end of two hundred and fifty years.

It seems this “fifty-four” sects, each with their own gospel, includes those that wrote the four canonical gospels, because a little later he writes of the “the authors of the fifty rejected gospels”. So, by removing the four canonical gospels from his fifty-four he arrives at … fifty gospels. This means he later declares:

Fifty gospels were fabricated and were afterwards declared apocryphal.

This seems to be the ultimate source of the “fifty gospels” claim, though how Voltaire arrived at the figure in the first place is not clear. Voltaire’s whole chapter on Christian history can be found here.

If Voltaire came up with the figure, its propagation seems to be, in substantial part, thanks to the American “Founding Father” John Adams (1735-1826). Unlike Voltaire, Adams remained a Christian but had some unorthodox views and was highly critical of Christianity’s role in history. In an often-quoted letter to John Taylor (14 December 1814), Adams laments the ills effects of religious entanglement with government:

What havoc has been made of Books through every Century of the Christian Æra? Where are fifty Gospells condemned as spurious by the Bull of Pope Gelasius. Where are the forty Waggon Loads of Hebrew Manuscripts burned in France by order of another Pope, because suspected of Heresy? Remember the Index expurgatorius, the Inquisitions, the Stake, the Axe the halter and the Guillotine; and Oh! horrible the Rack.

Here we find our “fifty gospels” again, but now they are being condemned by Pope Gelasius (492-496). This sounds slightly more well-founded than Voltaire’s reference and Adams seems very certain about it, since he refers to Gelasius as the villain again in another letter, but this time he has the pope burning the “fifty gospels”. In a letter to François Adriaan van der Kemp (23 January 1813) he asks:

Why have the most important Parts of Livy, Tacitus, Aristotle &c been destroyed? Why have the most important Work of Cicero, his Discourses on Government, been annihilated? &c &c &c without end? I can conceive of no plausible Answer to these questions, but this a conspiracy between Roman Catholick Divines and Roman Imperial Politicians, have burned every Thing in Pagan and Christian Antiquity which Stood in the Way of their Views of Spiritual and temporal Despotism. Why did Gelasius burn fifty Gospels at once?

So did Gelasius really condemn and burn “fifty gospels”? Well, no. Adams seems to have taken Voltaire’s “fifty gospels” and added them to the fact that Gelasius handed down the Decretum Gelasium which mandated the canon of the New Testament as defined by the Synod of Carthage in 419. Gelasius’ decretal also rejected any gospels other than the four canonical ones, so Adams put this together with Voltaire and decided that Gelasius must have condemned the mythical “fifty gospels”. The “burning” part seems to have come from his imagination.

It is very likely Adams did not have access to a copy of Gelasius’ decretal, but if he had, he would find that Gelasius actually only lists nine gospels that he considered to be apocryphal or heretical. Not “fifty”.

So Dawkins is the latest in a long line of well-intentioned but biased people who repeat historical “facts” that are not facts. Voltaire and Adams had the excuse of living in periods where checking these things was difficult. Dawkins does not.

150 thoughts on “Richard Dawkins Teaches the Children

  1. Meh. I gave up taking Dawkins seriously, on any subject except evolution, years ago. This is just one more nail in the coffin. He’s become a shallow polemicist.

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  2. “This is why, to the bewilderment of people like Dawkins, religion has survived the rise of science and, despite repeated rumours of its imminent demise, seems set to continue for quite some time.”

    Well, Western Europe is much less religious that most of USA, and people tend to not bring it into politics all the time (at all), there’s no creationists and no evangelical conservatives controlling the political power (although there’s some proliferation of far-right movements), and many politicians are openly non-religious or even atheists, so there’s room for hope.

    Thank you for the hard work

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    1. I think it’s hard to understand New Atheism without US politics. Dawkins himself seems to me quite prejudiced (should I say bigoted?) against anyone who doesn’t share his old Berkeley liberalism. For many US atheists, NA was just part of a political platform. Since Bush left office and islamophobia increasingly troubled them, they have joined in the Great Awokening.

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  3. “He shows how, over the centuries, over the millennia, we humans have been getting nicer, gentler, less violent, less cruel. The change has nothing to do with genetic evolution and nothing to do with religion. Whatever is ‘in the air’ has been moving in what we can broadly see as the same direction from century to century.”
    So… Dawkins and Pinker are *enormous* Whigs?

    I’m not sure how anyone could look at the 20th century and just say “Well, we’re obviously so much gentler and less violent than anyone from the distant past compared to our enlightened modern age”

    (Not to say that it wouldn’t be cherry picking to *only* look at the bad of the 20th century, but it certainly colors it…)

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      1. Yes it certainly is. His ideas are also, unsurprisingly parotted a lot by the “skeptic”, “European civic nationalist” type of people.

        They often make the argument that European culture is infinitely more superior to the rest of the planet only because of the enlightenment who was purely good and purely secular. They also use the enlightenment to shield themselves from being called racists by the left. That thing, only religious believers and reactionaries are capable of, they argue.

        There is no better example of this than this tweet (tough it’s posted by an arab)

        https://twitter.com/Diderot1789/status/1337347727890452489

        As a believing protestant, this always make me slightly annoyed.

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        1. I admit I’m not the most fond of the Enlightenment just because of various slanderous myths that came from that time. To me, it has its ups but is darn overrated as an era.

    1. Naturally, Steven Pinker also shares the Whigs’ conviction that Indigenous peoples around the world were just a bunch of violent “savages” until western Europeans came along and “civilized” them.

      Oh, and did I mention that he’s ridiculously obsessed with the so-called “Enlightenment”? The guy practically lives in the nineteenth century.

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  4. Great article.

    One thing I am still unclear about – does Dawkins think that the author of the Gospel of Matthew was working from Greek translations of Isaiah when he claimed that Jesus was born of a virgin? I can’t see how else Dawkins can reconcile his idea that the virgin birth was a mistranslation from Hebrew into Ancient Greek with the idea that Matthew inserted a new version into his Gospel to imply it had been fulfilled. Why would a first century Jew work from Greek translations of Hebrew holy books? Probably I am just missing something obvious.

    1. Yes, many Jews in the eastern Mediterranean were Greek speaking and the Septuagint was widely used by them. It’s also pretty well established that all the gospel authors were working from the Septuagint when writing their texts. So this is one thing that Dawkins gets right.

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    2. Though a fair number of people must have known Hebrew in the first c., the familiar Jewish idea of general familiarity with Hebrew arose with the rabbinical tradition beginning in ~180. Before that, Greek *and* Aramaic translations and ‘Targumim’ were read in synagogues. (To judge from Acts, both translations would have been read in Jerusalem itself). Everything in post-1st c Christianity turns on the Greek translation of the scriptural works and other texts. (The traditional Jewish Hebrew canon was not determinate ’til after 70 certainly, and even it includes some Aramaic.).

  5. Tim,
    I haven’t read Dawkins book and I don’t plan to but my impression is that while Dawkins may be a great biologist, he is washed out as a public intellectual. When he wrote books like *River Out of Eden* and *Mount Improbable*, he was at the top of his game. After he started commenting on social matters and making very insensitive and insulting remarks, I stopped reading him and taking him seriously. I lost respect for him despite wanting to respect him more than I do. I regret coming to the conclusion that he is a “has been” and should probably stop trying to “educate” the public.

    I don’t dislike him and I still think that his heart is in the right place but I wish he would retire from the intellectual scene. When he stopped being simply an evolutionary biologist and became a critic of religion, starting with *the God Delusion* is when he finally started to lose steam, in my opinion. He’s like a sitcom that finally gets cancelled after several seasons because it’s not funny anymore and the writers run out of ideas.

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    1. I have to agree. I remember his book The Selfish Gene making a great impression on me as a teenager, though I’m aware it’s considered a bit out of date by evolutionary biologists now. I rather liked The God Delusion at the time, largely because it was interesting to see a book on atheism getting mainstream attention. I also saw it had its flaws and when Dawkins tried to strike out with some arguments of his own in that book he proved he was no philosopher and should probably have stuck with the arguments we already have. But then the whole New Atheism thing took off and he and some of the other of its luminaries became increasingly insufferable and convinced they were experts on everything. Including history – thus I created this blog.

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      1. Sorry to reply here, not sure how to start a new comment. I was struck by what appears to be an uncharitable straw man, or simple factual error, in your first criticism of a quote of Dawkins. You quote Dawkins as saying, “It’s a historical accident – the adoption of Christianity as the Roman Empire’s official religion by the Emperor Constantine in AD 312 – that led to Yahweh’s being worshipped around the world today,”

        You follow the quote with, “The idea that it was Constantine who made Christianity the official religion of the Empire is a persistent myth and one derived from a long and largely Protestant theological tradition.”

        I don’t understand- are you doubting the historical consensus that asserts that Constantine indeed made Christianity the official religion of the empire? I just watched a Yale lecture by Professor Freedman, and he underscores what Dawkins said (that Constantine’s conversion indeed led to Christianity becoming the state religion of Rome).

        You then go on a tangent discrediting not what Dawkins said, but discrediting a traditional argument about Constantine’s apparently insincere conversion, but Dawkins (at least the portion you quote) never said any of that.

        Sorry if I’m coming across as uncharitable- this is just how I understand your comments. Would appreciate a clarification.

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        1. are you doubting the historical consensus that asserts that Constantine indeed made Christianity the official religion of the empire?

          I’m not “doubting” it. I’m clearly stating that what Dawkins claims is nonsense. Constantine DIDN’T make Christianity the official religion of the Empire. Theodosius did, on on 27 February 380, a full 43 years after Constantine died. So there is no “historical consensus” that Constantine did so, because he didn’t.

          I just watched a Yale lecture by Professor Freedman, and he underscores what Dawkins said (that Constantine’s conversion indeed led to Christianity becoming the state religion of Rome).

          Who is “Professor Freedman”? Paul H. Freedman? If he said that Constantine’s conversion eventually led to Christianity becoming the state religion of Rome, then that’s correct. But that happened eventually, long after Constantine. Dawkins did not say that. He said, several times, that Constantine “made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire”. And that is garbage. He didn’t. He was actually very careful not to.

          You then go on a tangent discrediting not what Dawkins said, but discrediting a traditional argument about Constantine’s apparently insincere conversion, but Dawkins (at least the portion you quote) never said any of that.

          And I didn’t say he did. My “tangent” was giving a historiographical context for Dawkins’ error of fact, detailing how it derives from a cluster of myths about Constantine that ultimately derives (somewhat ironically) from Protestant theology.

          Would appreciate a clarification.

          No problem – see above.

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          1. I apologize, of course you are correct about Theodosius. I listened to the lecture while preparing dinner- apparently I suck at retaining specifics… so while Constantine stopped the persecution of Christians, supported the construction of churches, promoted Christians to high office, officiated the council of Nicea to “clarify” church dogma, changed currency to include Christian symbols, Dawkins (like me) was incorrect in asserting C made Christianity the state religion. My bad.

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          2. @DAVID LEDOUX
            “officiated the council of Nicea to “clarify” church dogma”

            Perhaps I have this incorrect. But as I understand it: Constantine convened the council, but wasn;’t in any position to do any officiating.

            “changed currency to include Christian symbols”

            Roman coins were often changing across centuries of different imperial reigns. I remember looking into this some years ago and seeing that the inclusion of Christograms in known coins minted under Constantine were only in relation to events relevant to him personally. Such a coin marking a battle, where it shows his military standard piercing a serpent. His standard had a christogram included.
            It was under later emperors, after Christianity became the state religion of the empire, that large christograms began appearing non roman coinage.

        2. “…but discrediting a traditional argument about Constantine’s apparently insincere conversion…”

          How is it apparently insincere? And where are any traditional arguments about that?

      1. The first was a case where a man asked a woman at a social event to go to his hotel room for a coffee, she said no, and then she turned this most humdrum of situations – man asks out woman, woman says no, that’s it – into a blog post about her victimhood. The second is demonstrably true – from eugenic abortions of babies with downs syndrome to dog breeds. A bit of courage in standing up against modern far-left tropes is to his credit.

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        1. ‘The first was a case where a man asked a woman at a social event to go to his hotel room for a coffee, she said no …’

          She had left the social event announcing that she was going to her own hotel room _after_ having explicitly mentioned that she was not interested in any such invitations.

          It is a bad idea to extend invitations to people after they have said they are not interested in any such invitations. Really, this should go without saying, but obviously it doesn’t go without saying or the man in question wouldn’t have done what he did. Hence there was some justification for her to take the opportunity to tell people that kind of thing is a bad idea.

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        2. An absurd distortion of what occurred in “elevatorgate”: the woman in question had already made clear she did not want to be hit on, the man made hisa move at 4am in an elevator where only the two were present, and her mild admonition was “Guys, don’t do that.” For which she received an avalanche of hatred and lies which still continues, as you demonstrate. As for eugenics, it is demonstrably pseudoscience because – as the history of dog breeds shows quite clearly – if you select for a single trait, many other traits that you don’t want will inevitably come along with it.

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        3. There’s a lot of people, including an expert on genetics who has hundreds of publications (https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=Vrr4Ig0AAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate), who point out several problems. Many point out that our selective breeding has lead to numerous health issues within the animals themselves. These include breeds of dogs with serious health issues or cannot mate on their own. At best our selective breeding makes life that suits our needs better but have a much harder time on their own. Unless we’re trying to breed together some slave-race with various health problems keeping them from lasting without modern medicine, I doubt we’d get anything at all.

      2. @Spencer: It is like almost everytime you write a comment here you go into some leftist talking points. Can you please keep your politics to yourself. We know what you think because …well, just look at your face. Your misinterpretations of events is duly noted. If Tim should ban anyone, it is definitely you. I know you have some great insight every now and then, but the smugness…

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        1. No one is getting banned here simply for expressing their views so long as they are at least partially relevant to the topic, least of all Spencer. So stop being such a snowflake.

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        2. The supposedly oldest joke in history is about how a woman has never farted while sitting in the lap of a man.

          I think the second oldest joke should be how there has never existed a rightwinger who has not accused everyone else of political bias, and at the same time being utterly unaware of their own.

          A rightwinger has never been heard to have said, “I farted my politics in the lap of history.”

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    2. From the other side of the great divide, consider Victor Davis Hanson. His early stuff on hoplite warfare was terrific, or at least it seemed (and still seems in retrospect) that way to my amateur understanding. Then came 9/11 and he had an epiphany that Osama bin Laden was exactly like Xerxes, trying to destroy western civilization. It has been entirely downhill from there. At this point he is a crude partisan hack.

      It is an old and sad story. An expert who writes well gain attention from a book that is within his expertise. He concludes that he has ascended into omnicompetence, and wackiness ensues.

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  6. Thank you, Tim.

    You note in passing something that a lot of people miss about the use of Tanakh in the first century.

    It wasn’t that verses were seen as necessarily predictive of events, but rather, faced with contemporary events the writer would go back and use verses to highlight them. Like the reference to Rahab crying for her children.

    Matthew was a very enthusiastic practitioner of this kind of writing.

    Though that in turn suggests that he did believe there was something unusual about the birth of Jesus, since it’d hardly be worth the effort of highlighting if it was just a regular birth. God knows those are common enough.

    Regards.

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  7. As a fan of Richard Dawkins, I thank you for fact-checking his historical claims. Can you also make a historical analysis for his more famous book, “The God Delusion”?

    1. Ah, sweet memories. I read parts of The God Delusion and compared it with a now defunct website on logical fallacies. You may try the same and see how many you can find.

    2. Joel Edmund Anderson did a through analysis of that and the works of Hitchens and Harris on the site “Resurrecting Orthodoxy”. Also the “The New Atheist Denial of History” by Borden Painter

  8. This is a truly excellent article! I especially appreciate the link to my blog and the kind words you’ve said about my work!

    I haven’t read Richard Dawkins’s book, but it’s clear from the examples you’ve cited here that it contains some really egregious historical errors. I think Dawkins should be particularly embarrassed about his whole conflation involving the Epic of Gilgamesh, which clearly illustrates that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

    There are only a couple points that I slightly disagree with. One is that, personally, I probably wouldn’t have gone after Dawkins as harshly for his claim about there being “about fifty” gospels. I don’t think it’s really possible for us to know exactly how many gospels existed in antiquity and it’s not implausible that there could have been as many as fifty of them.

    What’s misleading about Dawkins’s claim isn’t so much the fact that his estimate is so high as the fact that he doesn’t bother to clarify that we really have no idea what the exact number was. By simply saying that there were “about fifty” and leaving it at that, he leaves his readers with the false impression this is the number of gospels that are actually known for certain to have existed, rather than a reasonable guess of how many might have existed.

    My second quibble is that I am actually quite convinced that the Septuagint’s translation of the Hebrew word ‘almāh as the Greek word παρθένος in the Book of Isaiah 7:14 is indeed a mistranslation. At the very least, it is a highly tendentious translation.

    From my understanding, the Hebrew word ‘almāh is a fairly straightforward word meaning “young woman.” The Greek word παρθένος, on the other hand, clearly is not. It’s true that this word probably originally simply referred to a young woman of marriageable age, without reference to virginity, but, by the time of the Septuagint translation, it bore the overwhelming connotation of virginity.

    When the classical Greeks applied the word παρθένος to a goddess like Athena, Hestia, or Artemis, they did so because these goddesses were believed to have taken vows to remain virgins forever, not because these goddesses were seen as especially youthful. (Hestia in particular was seen as matronly figure and, according to Hesiodos’s Theogonia, she was the eldest of the all the deities of Zeus’s generation.)

    Also notably, Jewish critics of Christianity in antiquity seem to have perceived the Septuagint’s translation of ‘almāh as παρθένος in Isaiah 7:14 as inaccurate. In Ioustinos Martys’s Dialogue with Tryphon 67, Tryphon makes almost exactly the same argument that Dawkins makes; he contends that ‘almāh simply means “young woman” and that the belief that Jesus was born of a virgin is therefore founded on a mistranslation.

    Obviously, Tryphon is biased and, of course, he immediately goes on to rather tendentiously interpret the story of the birth of Perseus from Danaë in Greek mythology as a “virgin birth.” Nonetheless, I am inclined to think that he makes a fair point about the translation of the word ‘almāh.

    Aside from these minor quibbles, I’m in complete agreement with everything you’ve said here. I think Dawkins needs to seriously rethink his whole approach to history.

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    1. “… it’s not implausible that there could have been as many as fifty of them”

      Then he should say that, not categorically state that there were. And where the hell he got fifty from in the first place I have no idea. That there may have been some more is possible, but plenty of things are merely possible. As I said, we only have evidence for about 14 to 18 non-canonical gospels. Anything beyond that is pure speculation.

      “by the time of the Septuagint translation, it bore the overwhelming connotation of virginity.”

      Sorry, but I find it very hard to accept that the translators of the Septuagint simply didn’t know what they were doing. Of course “parthenos” had strong connotations of virginity. So did “almah”, for obvious reasons.

      “Obviously, Tryphon is biased”

      Yes. And that’s the problem with that argument.

      1. “And where the hell he got fifty from in the first place I have no idea. ”

        This niggled at me, so I went to find out. It turns out he probably got it from people quoting a letter by John Adams, but ultimately it can be traced to Voltaire. See the addendum to my article above.

        1. Sidenote, the contrast in spelling between the Adams quotes and the older Voltaire quote threw me for a loop, until I remembered that Voltaire’s is probably a modern translation. (And now I’m wondering how “creative” his spelling in the original French was.)

          1. I admit this is veering very much off topic, but to answer Hyatt, quick Googling gave this example of Voltaire’s handwriting (from Candide):

            https://www.jetdencre.ch/voltaire-aussi-etait-nul-en-orthographe-7459

            Nothing particularly creative, I’m afraid, unless you consider “avait” and “était” as such. They were famously modern orthographies he promoted as opposed to the standard “avoit” and “étoit” of his time. The “mistakes” marked in the image are really mostly very minor, i.e. “pétit” pro “petit”, “vilage” pro “village”, “fraiche” pro “fraîche”. Even “encor” was an accepted variant at the time.

    2. To my way of thinking, the question obviously prompted by the discussion of whether παρθένος is a mistranslation of עַלמָה is this: is there a word in Greek (or, to be more precise, was there a word in the Greek of the time of the Septuagint translation) which would be a better translation? I remember reading what Dawkins wrote about there being a Hebrew word (בְּתוּלָה) which more specifically meant virgin, but he didn’t mention any other Greek words, which is the key point.

      1. To quote from the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament when it comes to παρθένος:

        “Since the etym. is uncertain, the semasiological development can be deduced only from the literary examples. The term obviously means a “mature young woman” already in Hom., with ref. to one who is not married (Il., 2, 513 f.: οὓς τέκεν … παρθένος αἰδοίη, hence παρθένιος, the son of a maiden, 16, 180); cf. then Aristoph. Nu., 530 f.: a παρθένος is not allowed to have a child; and on the other side Soph. Trach., 148 f.: ἕως τις ἀντὶ παρθένου γυνὴ κληθῇ (with her worries about husband and child). In the sense of “maiden” the emphasis, acc. to context, is either on the sex (Plat. Leg., VIII, 834d: παῖδας ἢ παρθένους, cf. VII, 794c), or age (Aristoph. Ra., 950 in contrast to old woman), or both (in Soph. Trach., 1071 f. Heracles says: ὥστε παρθένος βέβρυχα κλαίων), or on status (opp. of widow, Paus., II, 34, 12). The ref. in these instances is in fact usually to virgins, but there is no more stress on this than when we speak of a “girl” or “young woman” (which is in innumerable instances the best rendering). So Plut. (Mulierum Virtutes, 20 [II, 257e]): someone married someone as a young girl: Praec. Coniug., 2 [II, 138e]: the girlish whims of the young wife); hence it can be said of a young woman: παρθένων … τῶν ἐν Λακεδαίμονι εἶναι … αἰσχίστην (!), Paus., III, 7, 7. The word then went through an obvious process of narrowing down (cf. the German juncfrouwa, orig. “young lady”) and παρθένος came to be used for the “virgin.” So Aristoph. Eq., 1302 (παρθένοι for unused ships); Xenoph. Mem., I, 5, 2: θυγατέρας παρθένους διαφυλάξαι, Cornut. Theol. Graec., 34 παρθένος == ἄχραντος(unspotted) and ἁγνός (of Artemis); adj. Eur. Hipp., 1006: παρθένον ψυχὴν ἔχων (Hippolyt. is free from all erotic desire even of the eyes); Jos. Ant., 1, 34: παρθένος γῆ (from which Adam is formed); hence παρθενεύειν διὰ βίου of the Vestals, Dio C., 7, 8, 11.” (There’s quite a bit more, but far too much to quote).

        So even παρθένος need not exactly mean “virgin” in the LXX version of Isaiah 7:14. It should be noted that παρθένος also translates עַלמָה in LXX Genesis 24:43 (in reference to Rebekah, to-be-wife of Isaac); and Genesis 24:43 is more or less a repeat of Genesis 24:14 in which the Hebrew נַעֲרָה is used instead of עַלמָה, yet still is translated as παρθένος in LXX Genesis. Furthermore even בְּתוּלָה need not precisely specify a “virgin”, and “young women” or “maiden” as a meaning can be seen in such passages as Deut 32:25, Psalm 45:14, 78:63, 148:12, Isa 23:4, Jer 2:32, 31:13, 51:22, Lam 1:4, 18, 2:10, 21, 5:11, Ezek 9:6, Amos 8:13, Zech 9:17. In Deut 22:17 נַעֲרָה and בְּתוּלָה are used as synonyms. We thus have at least three Hebrew words – עַלמָה ,נַעֲרָה and בְּתוּלָה – which can indicate either “young woman” or “virgin”.

        A second Greek word which can mean “young woman” is νεᾶνις, which is also used in the LXX to translate all three of the Hebrew words listed above (Dt 22:19, 20; Jdg 19:3, 4, 5; Ruth 2:5; Exod 2:8; Ps 67:26; Song 1:3; 6:7; 1 Kings 1:2). We therefore have quite a lot of overlap not just in Hebrew, but in the Greek translation thereof.

        Lastly, we also can’t exactly rule out the Greek translator of Isaiah wasn’t working from a Hebrew text which had הַבְּתוּלָה instead of הָעַלְמָ֗ה in Isaiah 7:14. There’s enough differences in LXX Isaiah to suggest the translator was working from a different Hebrew Vorlage (source). Granted the oldest Hebrew manuscript containing Isaiah 7:14 in Hebrew is the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa) which does indeed read הועלמה (see http://dss.collections.imj.org.il/isaiah , 7th column, bottom line), which would indicate the reading goes back to at least the 2nd century BCE, roughly around the time LXX Isaiah was being done.

        Hope that answers your question… by not actually answering your question!

        1. The proper German spelling is Jungfrau, not “juncfrouwa.” I am not a native speaker of German, but I do speak German tolerably well. If you are basing this spelling on some medieval Middle High German document or something, you should say so explicitly.

      2. “I remember reading what Dawkins wrote about there being a Hebrew word (בְּתוּלָה) which more specifically meant virgin, but he didn’t mention any other Greek words, which is the key point.” _ J-D

        “….in the Hebrew language there is no relationship between the words almah and virgin. On the contrary, it is usually a young woman who bears children. The word alma only conveys age/gender. Had Isaiah wished to speak about a virgin, he would have used the word betulah1 (בְּתוּלָה) not almah. The word betulah appears frequently in the Jewish Scriptures, and is the only word – in both biblical and modern Hebrew – that conveys sexual purity. ___
        https://outreachjudaism.org/alma-virgin/

        Since the writers of the Christian scriptures were trying to shoehorn a virgin birth into the text of the Jewish Scriptures, the key point is whether what is being claimed of the Jewish text is in fact true. Here, as elsewhere, it is not.

        Advantage Dawkins? Yes, only on a technicality.

        Sad that such a seemingly brilliant man is such a shallow thinker. But then, it seems the latter is true of most if not all of the “modern atheists.”

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        1. “Since the writers of the Christian scriptures were trying to shoehorn a virgin birth into the text of the Jewish Scriptures”

          Septuagint was Jewish Scriptures, though. Just because later it was abandoned by Jews does not mean that it hadn’t been used by Diaspora Jews. (And Masoretic text is not exactly the pure early Hebrew text either)

          1. Who said that the Septuagint “hadn’t been used by Diaspora Jews”? And what has that got to do with what I said in your quote from me?

          2. “Septuagint was Jewish Scriptures, though.”

            “Septuagint was Jewish Scriptures, though.” – Jarno Lång

            Not really..,

            “…the Septuagint in our hands is not a Jewish document, but rather a Christian recension. The original Septuagint, translated some 2,200 years ago by 72 Jewish scholars, was a Greek translation of the Five Books of Moses alone, and is no longer in our hands. It therefore did not contain the Books of the Prophets or Writings of the Hebrew Bible such as Isaiah, …. The Septuagint as we have it today, which includes the Prophets and Writings as well, is a product of the Church, not the Jewish people. In fact, the Septuagint remains the official Old Testament of the Greek Orthodox Church, and the manuscripts that consist of our Septuagint today date to the third century C.E. The fact that additional books known as the Apocrypha, which are uniquely sacred to the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Church, are found in the Septuagint should raise a red flag to those inquiring into the Jewishness of the Septuagint.”
            ____________
            https://outreachjudaism.org/the-virgin-birth/

        2. Hi Yonason, Im referring to your subsequent comment regarding when the Septuagint was written and which books were included (I couldnt reply there).

          According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “Analysis of the language has established that the Torah, or Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament), was translated near the middle of the 3rd century BCE and that the rest of the Old Testament was translated in the 2nd century BCE.”

          Are you saying this is simply wrong? It appears the whole of the OT was translated into Greek long before the church even existed.

          1. Hi, PC1.

            I’m not knowledgeable on the finer points you’re asking about. Basically, I think R’ Singer would be the one to ask. His contact info can be found at the link I provided. Personally, I’ve known of his work for over 2 decades, and have met him on several occasions. He’s always impressed me as a man with an attention to detail that I could trust. I recommend you ask him, as he will be able to provide much more insight than I. He’s very approachable. If you do, please post what you learn from him. Thanks and Regards.

        3. For some reason wikipedia disagrees with you about Septuagint. And I am not sure how reliable I consider a site called “outreachjudaism”…

          Also Dead Sea Scrolls seem to have text that is closer to Septuagint than Masoretic.

          1. I don’t use Wikipedia, for reasons like that illustrated in this Dilbert cartoon.
            https://dilbert.com/strip/2009-05-08

            As to Greek versions of Jewish texts being found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, I doubt it was due to a belief in their legitimacy, any more than finding Christian material in Rabbi Singer’s home would indicate that he took them seriously w/r to Judaism.

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          2. @Yonason: so you think a cartoon more reliable than an article backed with dozens of references to professional sources.
            OK.

  9. “which leads the young reader to question the idea of God by presenting it as just another among many ancient myths”
    Making kids read (retold) Greek and Norse mythology might be far more effective than preaching.

    “It’s a historical accident”
    Huh? There was nothing accidental about Constantine’s conversion. Call it a good or a bad thing (I’m not interested), it was not like the emperor picked christianity out of a grab bag.

    “It was the loyalty to him of the Army”
    which at the time consisted of many christians and hence gave him a great political advantage indeed. This does not imply by any means that Constantine’s conversion was insincere; that would be a false dilemma.
    I suppose Dawkins uses a version of the Conflict Thesis, ie paganism and christianity by definition had to be in conflict all the time? That’s grossly outdated, as the biography of Sinesius of Cyrene teaches us (he lived after 400 CE!).

    “the fact that they arrived at a selection of four gospels which …..”
    Consulting Wikipedia, like I did a long time ago, suffices to confirm this. Apparently it was too hard for Dawkins.

    “written slightly more recently”
    BWAHAHAHAHA!
    I wonder if he would use this argument when writing a history of Evolution Theory.

    “The debated texts were all lesser epistles or works”
    Thanks, that’s a nice fact I didn’t know yet.

    “There is little to no sign of any actual research here.”
    Like the way creationists “research” evolution theory, you mean?

    “Accuracy is not the point, landing punches is.”
    Many an apologist will be happy with Dawkins’ inaccurate punches.

    “…. were not exactly morons”
    This bothers me most. I’ve read some ex-creationist deconversion stories and a common theme is realizing that evolutionary biologists aren’t exactly morons either.

    “But how much do we really know about Jesus?”
    Teens may be black-and-white thinkers, they can be original too. Several may ask: “So what? Why should I conclude from this that there is no (christian) god?”

    “though his young readers are unlikely to realise this”
    Until they meet a compentent teacher or an actual historian who points this out. Yay.
    Like with the God Delusion Dawkins hasn’t done atheism a favour, to put it very mildly.

    “The whole book has the tone of thoughts by someone who has not read widely on any of the historical topics”
    Neither have I. Still I recognize too many falsehoods.

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    1. “which at the time consisted of many christians and hence gave him a great political advantage indeed.”

      Evidence on the number of Christians in the Army by the early fourth century is mixed, but none of it indicates “many” and certainly not enough to give any kind of political advantage. If Christians only made up 10-15% of the general population, it is hard to see why the percentage would be markedly higher in the military. The Army was loyal to Constantine because (i) they had loved his father, (ii) he won battles and (iii) he gave them donatives and loot.

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      1. Also, didn’t the early Church before it became state religion consider military service as dubious at best? I mean… serving in the military sometimes might even mean that you will not get baptized, at least according to Hippolytus of Rome.

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  10. “Dawkins’ bold claim that the idea of the Virgin Birth is “[Matthew’s] invention” ignores the fact that the story of Mary’s virginity is also told independently in gLuke. So clearly it predated both these gospels and was not “invented” by the gMatt writer.”

    Do you mind if I ask you how we know that “clearly” came before Luke and Matthew? Couldn’t one of them have created the story based on biblical exegesis and later the other copied it? Luke is anti-jewish and Matthew is pro-jewish, but even so, one of them could be a response to the other.
    Maybe, I’m thinking, it’s more probable that the virginal conception came from the apotheosis of the character of Jesus, (since virginal conceptions are a common trope of divinised men) and later they tried rationalising it as they could, quoting whatever verses they could find. I don’t know, I’m seriously asking.

    I find fascinating the Origins of Christianity

    1. “Couldn’t one of them have created the story based on biblical exegesis and later the other copied it?”

      The majority of NT scholars agree that gLuke and gMatt are independent of each other, for some long and very complicated reasons. So, no.

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      1. Yeah sorry, I imagined that I was asking too much by asking you to explain me how we know, it just strikes me that we can know it with any certainty. Can you tell me of any material about the Q hypothesis or related that I could read?

        Thank you

        1. As I often say, people who like to “know with any certainty” should avoid ancient history. They should doubly avoid anything to do with the origins of Christianity. There can never be anything like “certainty”. But, occasionally, in amongst all the disagreement on pretty much everything, some ideas gain a consensus. That’s about as close to “certainty” as we get. The “Two Source Hypothesis” to the Synoptic Problem has been the consensus view for about a century. And it has gMatt and gLuke as independent of each other, but dependant on gMark and the common material we call Q. Here is a good summary of why this makes most sense.

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          1. Thank you

            “As I often say, people who like to “know with any certainty” should avoid ancient history. They should doubly avoid anything to do with the origins of Christianity.” (how do you quote?)

            Yeah, you said that in Mythvision, and I understand it (and I already knew it). But I care enough to understand why the minimal certainty (any) that we can have is the one that we think we have.
            You should be thankful that I’m here and not with Richard Carrier lmao.

            I’m sorry for keeping you occupied with me.

          2. @Javier: “the minimal certainty (any) that we can have”
            This doesn’t make sense in science, in physics not anymore than in historical research. There is no certainty, let alone a minimal certainty. Measurement accuracy is an entire subject of study in physics. Compare the age of our Universe; only 40 years ago it was estimated 10 – 20 billion of years.
            Philosophy of science can explain why. Ultrashort version: deductive conclusions (including theories) depend on the assumptions they are based upon and assumptions are by definition uncertain. Inductive conclusions (recognizing patterns etc.) suffer from the Problem of Induction by Simple Enumeration – you can never know with any certainty if the next observation will fit the pattern. Compare superconductivity at relatively high temperatures.
            Certainty is the wrong term, because it implies binary thinking. So I prefer probability. Given the avaiable data some conclusions have a higher probability than others. The most famous standard is Ockham’s Razor. Professional historians have developed quite a few standards specifically for their research and tested them. But any conclusion still might be wrong. As Hawking wroten in A Brief History of Time: every scientific theory has a temporary character (this might not be the exact quote).

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          1. It’s also worth knowing it is rejected by most scholars and accepted by many conservatives more out of doctrinal bias than reason. Conservative Christian scholars don’t like accepting the existence of Q because they don’t accept that any of “the inspired Word of God” could be lost. The majority view works better, is more parsimonious and is based on reason, not dogma.

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          2. It’s worth noting that the late F. F. Bruce didn’t seem to have a problem with the Q hypothesis (or at least, that is my recollection from when I was on that side of the fence, long ago). So some of the smarter evangelicals have managed to accommodate themselves to modern scholarship, somewhat.

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  11. Oh, indeed. I wasn’t arguing for it, rather was laying out the ideas that are there since Javier had asked the question. I agree that a dislike of the idea of Q is a driver for many who like Farrer. I’m one who thinks the attempts at Q reconstruction etc. are overblown, but agree that its probably more likely than the Farrer hypothesis. That being said, Goodacre’s approach to this is worth working through, as one of the better presentations of this idea.

    1. I’m very confused by Tim’s response to your initial message. I’ve never heard of a single conservative scholar accepting Farrer, and can’t really see any reason why they’d be drawn to it in the first place. Tim’s assertion that the Farrer Hypothesis is based on dogma instead of reason is one of the more bizarre takes I’ve seen on this academic debate and makes me wonder how much he has actually looked into this. How could the removal of an earlier source make it any more likely that “the inspired word” wouldn’t be lost? The Farrer hypothesis itself relies on different geographical versions of oral tradition stories to explain alternating primitivity. There is nothing in the hypothesis itself that would suggest traditional authorship or the authors preserving the “inspired word” and instead suggests authorial motives that are not based on writing accurate accounts.

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      1. “I’ve never heard of a single conservative scholar accepting Farrer”

        I didn’t make any mention of Farrer, someone else did. I was referring to the more general concept of rejecting Q, most recently championed by Goodacre. And I find it being pushed mainly by two types – evangelical fundamentalists and Mythicists.

        “Tim’s assertion that the Farrer Hypothesis is based on dogma instead of reason is one of the more bizarre takes I’ve seen on this academic debate and makes me wonder how much he has actually looked into this”

        Bart Ehrman has made the same observation about the rejection of Q (see above about me saying nothing about Farrer), so it can’t be that “bizarre”. And no, I’m not claiming it’s why they say they reject the Two Source Hypothesis, just that I suspect it’s one of the actual reasons.

        “How could the removal of an earlier source make it any more likely that “the inspired word” wouldn’t be lost? “

        I have no idea. I also have no idea what that question has to do with anything I’ve said.

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        1. You were responding to someone who only brought up the Farrer hypothesis and didn’t directly mention removing Q (though it is part of the hypothesis)
          > It’s also worth knowing it is rejected by most scholars and accepted by many conservatives more out of doctrinal bias than reason.
          The first sentence in your response to Colin doesn’t mention removing Q so it seems rather natural to read it as a response to Colin’s short summary of the Farrer hypothesis. The rest of your response was effected by this misunderstanding.

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          1. The rest of your response was effected by this misunderstanding.

            No, the rest of what you mistakenly thought was my response was affected by your misunderstanding. I reply to a lot of comments here and often do so on the run, so if I don’t always manage to be completely clear, I think I can be forgiven. Wandering in here telling me I don’t know what I’m talking about in your very first comment hasn’t exactly endeared me to you. Let’s see if you can do better from now on.
            Edit: And now you’ve started a thread about this on /r/AcademicBiblical? Seriously – get a life.

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        2. “And no, I’m not claiming it’s why they say they reject the Two Source Hypothesis, just that I suspect it’s one of the actual reasons.”

          – to be fair, that isnt how you presented it in your initial response. You present it as objective fact, not just your opinion.

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          1. You present it as objective fact

            No, I didn’t. Virtually nothing on this kind of issue can be “presented as objective fact”, so I would never do so.

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  12. On the relationship between gMatt and gLuke, Goodacre and a few others suggest Q did not exist, in which case the virgin birth could have been derived from gMatt by Luke. But the discordances between the two nativity scenes strike against this view. If Luke had known gMatt, he would have indicated some knowledge of Matthew’s specific claims about Jesus’s early life. And the Q materials do not appear to be embellished or strategically arranged within Luke’s narrative, indicating the likelihood he drew from Q directly rather from Matthew instead of Q. Matthew on the other hand worked the Q materials in to a narrative structure, tweaking and expanding Q’s enigmatic teachings to match this rhetorical purpose.

    If Matthew was the originator of the Q materials, then Luke’s apparent decontextualized and unadorned (or “primitive”) version the sayings doesn’t make sense.

    Outside of Q, other similarities between M&L (like the virgin birth) likely came from general Christian lore, as Tim suggests.

    The nativity genre was popular, and both Matt and Luke independently composed their genealogies and nativities following genre conventions, and did not evidently compare notes. Broad strokes show generic similarity but minor details show abundant disagreements.

    The virgin birth might have existed as one early apologetic response to negative rumors about Mary, and gMatt addresses such aspersions directly in Matt 1:19. But the claim might have have had a different resonance within the more cosmopolitan Pauline congregations Luke addressed.

    So the passage in Isaiah was a convenient way for Matthew to buttress a fantastic claim already used in defense of Mary’s chastity. Invoking the LXX translation of Isaiah 7:14 is likely about defending the then-current idea of the virgin birth to a Jewish audience. Luke did not necessarily need to make that argument based on messianic prophecy for his audience.

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  13. To quote from McDaniel`s review of Better Angels:
    “Judging from Pinker’s professed love for Thomas Hobbes and centralized government, you would think that the Byzantine Empire would be his paradise, but yet I’m not even sure if he knows it existed.”

    Fancy that.

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  14. Yikes! I realised after reading this that I’d mentioned the ‘Constantine made Christianity the state religion’ myth in my latest post. I’m feeling pretty stupid as I really should have known better; I’m sure I did know this was wrong, so can’t think how I made that mistake. However, I’ve now put in a footnote explaining that I was wrong about this point (fortunately it was a very small part of my overall post), so thanks for pointing out that this one is incorrect.

  15. Hello.

    I’m a atheist, and probably it would have been more difficult to me, to lead myself to a path fo truth, and another way of thinking if not by the work of some New Atheist, namely the authors, although I have not read any of their books, barely some debates that as a Christian I simply dismissed, but if they didn’t exist, would I ever ponder the thoughts?

    What I mean, New Atheists, have gotten plenty of things wrong, but among the work of exposing lies from religious organization and groups, it is more from the New Atheists and YouTube atheists that apparently some mingle with the New Atheist. They are having a positive effect in which they may put some believers to think or at least enter the discussion. Good thing error and lies are exposed. But, they have some credit that I’m not saying no one is giving, on being militant in exposing lies in certain aspects; of course, the problem is that some are lying as well, that’s not good.

    I’m an antitheist, I think it is good thing. I approve about this kind of posts debunking the lies, mistakes and errors of anyone regardless of sharing or not a common position.

    What I may object is the position of some atheist that think that the problem of the New Atheist is that they are active against religions, that’s not the problem for me, the problem is that as religious individuals they have been lazy and dishonest and forgetting to apply skepticism to their sources. They have fallen under cognitive biases that we all must be wary of.

    “Truth be spoken. Truth be regarded. Truth be respected. This is only if care about it.”

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    1. “I’m a atheist, and probably it would have been more difficult to me, to lead myself to a path fo truth, and another way of thinking if not by the work of some New Atheist, namely the authors”

      Fine. All the more reason for those authors to practice what they preach and check their facts. With history, they often don’t. Thus this blog.

      “What I may object is the position of some atheist that think that the problem of the New Atheist is that they are active against religions”

      My position is that IF you are going to be an activist, you need to get what you’re saying right. I consider it largely pointless and counterproductive myself. I also think the reducing many of the things they rail against to “religion” (and not, say, geopolitics, tribalism and authoritarianism) is wrongheaded and that religion has as many good effects as bad ones, but I can see why others differ on that. But if someone is going to be anti-religion then you have more reason to make sure their polemic is soundly-based. And that means not abusing or twisting history to fit their agenda. The NAs and their followers do the latter all too often. Thus this blog.

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      1. “I also think the reducing many of the things they rail against to “religion” (and not, say, geopolitics, tribalism and authoritarianism) is wrongheaded and that religion has as many good effects as bad ones, but I can see why others differ on that.”

        I agree. Boris, if you’re interested in a sample size of one, I have been very sceptical of the existence of any gods for a long time. But probably the biggest thing that put me off accepting that is the far-fetched ideological agenda that has gone with it for the last 15 years or so. This agenda seems oblivious to historical nuance (or historical fact, in many cases), condescending to the point of attributing gullible idiocy at best to religious people and malign murderousness at worst, and so often inextricably linked to a woke, university campus-level of far-left politics.

        It should be possible to simultaneously (a) deny that God exists, (b) deny that religion poisons everything, and all the associated myths and simplistic ideological surrounding this claim. But some people seem determined to present them as a package deal. For me the package seemed a much less convincing offer. Reading blogs like this has made me feel a lot more at ease with my atheism as I don’t any more feel like I am signed up to a load of demonstrable nonsense.

        Maybe I should have done enough research to separate the two myself, and maybe I’d have got around to it, but I am rather glad writers like Tim have done it for me.

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        1. You might try to separate New Atheism/antitheism from what you call far-left politics as well. Start with Sam Harris. It could save you from producing “demonstrable nonsense”, like in that comment on Richard Dawkins (also not exactly far-left).

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        2. … and so often inextricably linked to a woke, university campus-level of far-left politics.

          Ummm, atheist activism has actually swung hard in the opposite direction in recent years. If anything, it’s now veering toward the reactionary right. In fact, it always has. Dawkins is not exactly a social progressive, Harris considers himself part of the ridiculous soft alt-right “Intellectual Dark Web” and old Hitchens was a cheerleader for the Neo-Cons’ idiotic and disastrous military fiascos in the Middle East. Hardly “far left”.

          I’m getting tired of right wingers throwing around “woke” and “far left” for anything mildly more progressive than the politics of Genghis Khan. Give it a rest.

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          1. ‘Dawkins is not exactly a social progressive’

            There is a lengthy and extensively footnoted Wikipedia article called ‘Political view of Richard Dawkins’. It cites statements Dawkins has made about several specific political issues: I won’t give examples because people who really want to know can check for themselves and decide for themselves whether they think his positions are socially progressive.

            In party-political terms, apparently until about ten or fifteen years ago he usually voted Labour and since then has also voted and expressed support for the Liberal Democrats. (In the same year, 2009, he was one of twenty public figures who responded to an invitation to provide suggestions about how to improve the Labour Party and also a national conference speaker for the Liberal Democrats.)

            (There is also a Wikipedia article called ‘Political views of Christopher Hitchens’, but not one called ‘Political views of Sam Harris’.)

          2. You claimed atheists tend to be “woke”. Please give some examples of this “wildness” from Dawkins or Harris. Explain, for example, how Harris’ justifications of torture is “woke”. Or Dawkins’ stance on transgender people. Or Hitchens’ enthusiasm for the invasion of Iraq. Good luck.

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          3. @J-D: that Wikipedia article on Dawkins says that

            “many of Dawkins’s political statements have created controversy among left-wing … communities.”
            Because they are not that left-wing. Let alone far-left.
            Some of is views may be typical liberal and hence seen as progressive in the USA (on abortion for instance), they are shared by many right-wingers in Europe.
            So the Wikipedia article confirms what I wrote: “also not exactly far-left”..

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          4. There’s a comment below from you (that is, Tim O’Neill) which does not have a ‘Reply’ button beneath it (which is why I’m replying here instead) and in which you have written: ‘You claimed atheists tend to be “woke”.’

            This comment appears immediately beneath one of mine as if it’s a response to my comment, although I’m not absolutely sure that was the intent, and therefore not absolutely sure that the ‘You’ in the comment is in fact myself.

            However, just in case it was me that you were addressing, I would like to point out that I never claimed that atheists tend to be woke, so it seems possible that you have confused me with somebody else. ‘Woke’ is not a term I have ever used to describe anybody (nor have I ever described anybody as not being woke; it’s just not my language).

          5. Comparing reactionary right-wingers to Genghis Khan is a somewhat misinformed insult to a man who, according to most sources, while being a ruthless and brutal warlord, appointed loyal and effective people to high positions regardless of their ethnic background, was a religious pluralist, and was happy to acknowledge and profit from the better aspects of other cultures. Or, by modern alt-right standards, a “woke”, “virtue-signalling”, “forced diversity” supporting “cuck” who would be incapable of achieving anything outside his intellectually decadent university ivory tower…

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          6. J-D didn’t say that, I did. I agree that Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens aren’t woke – although all three are clearly at minimum left-leaning.

            But yes, I don’t think any are woke and as they are the leading figures in the movement that is a very important caveat. Point conceded. What I had in mind was more the kind of people you read on the internet and who run Sceptics in the Pub events here in London – and I *do* stand by the idea that they think far-left and woke politics are a necessary condition to be one of them. I am relieved to read blogs like these that don’t really take that tack at all. I don’t know what Tim’s politics are and it’s not important because I find his blog extremely informative and unconnected to his politics either way.

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    2. An anti-theist isn’t that much different from a New Atheist — a bigoted ideology whose adherents can’t live at let live. While religion is a double edged sword, Anti-theism is a hasn’t contributed a single thing to history or had any positive effect whatsoever. Especially seeing how many former ATs are realizing how pointless and overall stupid it is. Ditto with NA.

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      1. I admit that the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism are nastier than they have to be, and they could have avoided making embarrassing mistakes about history if they had read books by (for instance) David C. Lindberg, Toby E. Huff, and Jared Diamond as I have done. If you will excuse my “moral equivalency” argument, however, (1) Hitchens and Dawkins and others have understandably responded to the extremism leading to the Twin Towers tragedy, and (2) forty percent of the population of the United States want to set up a Christian theocracy. Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens are not qualified for the task of addressing the bigoted ideology of many (not all) Christians–but SOMEBODY has to do the job! And by the way, I can easily live in peace with the gay Episcopalians of Santa Fe, New Mexico, since they don’t bother me or anybody else.

        1. That entire “Four Horsemen of the New Atheism” thing had me shaking my head. Its entire basis was that the four of them had independently written bestseller books that critiqued religion (no regard of the quality of those books)

          Without doubt: Daniel Dennett has written some great books. Of the four; he’s the one with the most credentials. It’s notable how he’s the one who’s also managed to not indulge his new atheist fanclub and stay out of any limelight.

          Richard Dawkins has written some excellent books to convey biology to the masses since the 70s. But I found the god delusion his worst book. I also shake my head of the absolute worship of him that many of his fans (mostly in the USA) indulged in. While he’s no fool when it comes to science and a decent writer: He always struck me as someone who’d be a bit of a pratt in person.

          Christopher Hitchens had me more mystified. Yes the man was a good journalist and had a lot of success in the USA. But he’s nothing special amongst the top British journalists of his era. And like most journalists he was often wrong, which is hardly surprising given that he didn’t really have any credentials or expertise in anything beyond his bachelor’s degree in PPE and his career in journalism. I can’t help feeling that he is held in such regard by some Americans because he was articulate by American standards and because he often presented things from a point of view that often was very progressive to much of US society (although contemporary beyond the USA).

          But Sam Harris is the biggest mystery. I’m not going to claim that the man is an idiot or anything (he’s obviously very intelligent). But I have never seen what the big deal is with him. He’s a decent writer, but nothing amazing. And he’s not really any expert in anything.

  16. With regards to the various gospels of Thomas, Judas, etc., it seems to me that a factor other than date that kept them out of the canon was their pseudo-gnostic worldview that would have been alien to most Christians at the time.

    1. True. He starts off talking about belief in God, then narrows that to “the Abrahamic religions”. But after the first few pages it’s pretty much Christianity all the way, and a particularly naïve and fundamentalist form at that.

        1. Many anti-theists are literalists. Many enjoy getting involved in discussions about the correct interpretation of religious texts (mostly the Bible, of course). It never ceases to amaze me. My stance is: no matter your exegesis, I don’t believe anyway.

  17. A comment, not a question.

    Thank you for this :

    Of course, this ignores the fact that religions have never been only about explaining the world and how it works and provide all kinds of other utility: ethical frameworks, sources of meaning, transcendental experiences, social networks, psychological supports etc.

    My husband is a devotee of Hitchens and Dawkins, and I’ve learned not to argue with him, as he (and they) loudly reject any attempt at viewing religion as a social phenomenon. And certainly insist that nothing good can be said of it, at all.

    At the same time, he (and they) demonstrate their ignorance of history, psychology, sociology, philosophy, as well as their inability to understand and accept nuance and complexity.

    And thank you for this blog, which I found this morning while looking for information about Mithras and December 25, to respond to a New Atheist meme. Oh, and that you for that term, as well.

    I guess I do have a question, although it is rhetorical : Is it my imagination, or is there an intersection between New Atheists and New Age believers?

    1. Is it my imagination, or is there an intersection between New Atheists and New Age believers?

      If there is any overlap, I’d say it’s extremely small. In my experience, those two sets of ideas tend to attract two completely different types of people. Atheists tend to be sceptical, inclined against all supernatural beliefs and trusting in science. New Agers tend to be … none of those things.

      1. Not atheists in general, but New Atheists specifically. They seem all too willing to accept anything that supports their disdain for religion. Their skepticism does not seem to extend to non-scientific claims. As with all of us, they are amateurs outside of their specialization.

        Maybe it’s an American phenomenon. It’s fairly common to hear, “I don’t believe in god, but I do believe in spirituality.”

        I am thinking specifically of several highly educated acquaintances who call themselves atheists and are Druids, Wiccans, and Pure Land Buddhists. The friends who share the clearly New Atheist memes at this time of year and in the Spring as well as clearly New Age memes. And my darling husband, the follower of Hitchens and Dawkins, also believes in ghosts and crystals and healing by visualizing specific colors of light — although he’s an Aussie, so ….

  18. Bad scholarship in atheism is probably a result of it being an unproductive field of thought manned by part-timers and internet trolls. The arguments for gods and miracles haven’t improved in centuries. Why would any serious scholar spend their time on it? I’m an atheist; but I put that stance in the same category as “non-believer in bigfoot” rather than an issue to devote much thought to. I like the history in your articles but I don’t see how we will ever have good atheist scholarship when there is really not much more one can contribute to the idea that there is no Zeus-like being in the sky.

    1. Bigfoot is supposed to be natural, gods supernatural. So no, it’s not the same category. As for atheist scholarship – assuming you are thinking of (anti-)apologetics, there is quite some literature. Ao for slightly chauvinistic reasons I own Herman Philipse’s God in the Age of Science; his bibliography is extensive, including many books written by atheists. Whether we need to read them is another question.
      So I’m afraid your “I don’t see …” tells us more about you being unfamiliar with literature than about atheist scholarship.

    2. I agree with you and Tim that “Most atheists come to that position more or less on their own. …. Essentially, I worked it out for myself.” The core of atheism is Hitchens’ Razor and Occam’s Razor. Per Hitchens’ Razor, the burden of proof lies on believers in God and leprechauns because there are infinitely more ways to guess wrong than there are to guess right: “You have asserted it without evidence, and I can dismiss it without evidence.“ Per Occams’ Razor, it is far more parsimonious to attribute the origin of complex life to mindless non-random natural selection than to a God complex enough to hold billions of separate conversations with every human on earth at once if he wanted to. And if pain and misery on earth are adequately explained by war, germs, and tidal waves, why mess things up by dragging God into the picture? This is atheism in a nutshell; the rest is details.

    3. The best “atheist scholarship” is called “science.” That’s why evangelicals and other fundamentalists object so strongly to actual science being taught in elementary and secondary schools. Years ago, a colleague at BYU (yes, that BYU) said that when he asked his biology professor whether he “believed” in evolution, the professor simply pulled down a dozen or so skulls and arranged them in order from Australopithecus to modern human.

      History, archaeology, and anthropology are also good sources.

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      1. Great. The best “religious scholarship” is also called “science”. That’s why you only talk about fundamentalists, totally neglecting the fact that even in the USA they are a minority. That approach is rather unscientific, I say – you omit inconvenient but relevant data.

        1. Where have you seen “the best religious scholarship” called “science?” I’ve seen it called “theology” or “philosophy” or even “metaphysics,” but not science. How would one go about testing hypotheses about religion using the scientific method? How would on conduct experiments on the supernatural? Can you provide us with citations to the peer-reviewed studies you’re alluding to?

          1. By historians of antiquity who reviewed JP Meier’s A Marginal Review for instance.
            Oh wait – you suddenly use “religious scholarship” in a narrow sense. Well, then I’ll use “atheist scholarship” in the same way. Lo and behold! Atheist scholarship suddenly also can’t be called science. It can be philosophy or even metaphysics. A favourite example of mine is Herman Philipse’s God in the Age of Science. It deals exactly with the issues that bother you.
            Of course as the good new atheist you are you’ll stick to your double standard. So I’ll simply end with “naturalism” is not a synonym for “atheism”, no matter how much you want it. Exactly because scientists can’t do experiments on the supernatural they can’t say anything scientific about the god-question.
            Also it would be nice if you began to use the words “scholar” and “scientist” in an unambiguous way.
            The net result of your comments combined now is the famous “you’re not even wrong”.
            Or withdraw your ‘The best “atheist scholarship” is called “science.”” That would be worth a compliment. Then I would have to withdraw some of my remarks as well.
            Deal?

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      2. Science isn’t any “Atheist scholarship”. Or at least no more (or less) than any other scholarship.
        Do you think that Aristotle was any atheist? Or René Descartes?

        1. I did not say that science is atheist scholarship, however, I’ll indulge your logical fallacy. What role does God have in science?
          I said nothing about scientists. Did Aristole or Descartes utilize the scientific method to discover objective facts about the world, or did they declare, “And then, a miracle happens!”

          1. You said the best atheist scholarship is science but when presented with counter-examples your defence is that religious scientists didn’t actually attribute everything to miracles so they don’t count?

            I think your brief posts are a good example of the motivated and circular reasoning of the new atheists. Declare religion fundamentally at war with science, then when presented with clear evidence of religious people making real scientific discoveries decide that they can’t have been religious – because after all they used the scientific method.

            Just insert atheism instead of God into the above post to see how absurd this is:

            “What role does atheism have in science?
            Did Aristotle or Descartes utilize the scientific method to discover objective facts about the world, or did they declare ‘God does not exist’?”.

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          2. Neither Aristoteles nor Descartes utilized the scientific method as we do today for the simple reason that it wasn’t developed yet. Methodological naturalism is only 200-250 years old. Sir Isaac Newton indeed declared a variation of “and then a miracle happens!” Lo and behold, his laws are still taught at high schools, albeit stripped from that miracle (I’m talking Newton’s model of the Solar System).
            The scientific method is for everybody, believers and unbelievers alike.

    1. Ummm, no. No book riddled with basic errors of fact can be considered “a very good book”, least of all one that lauds reason and sticking to … facts. So your comment is clearly stupid and wrong.

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      1. I allow myself to have a different opinion and will not call your comment or various of your postings “stupid”.
        Richard Dawkins addresses an educational book to adolescents. It is well written and interesting, contains many strands of argument that young people are not taught in school in this context and defends itself against a global prejudice that religious, especially Christian faith, is positive per se.
        A good book in a series of excellent books by him.

        1. I allow myself to have a different opinion and will not call your comment or various of your postings “stupid”.

          You’re certainly entitled to your “opinion”. Whether they are stupid or not depends on whether you can back them up. You can call my positions “stupid” if you want, but if you do so, you had better back that up with solid argument or things will not go well for you.

          Richard Dawkins addresses an educational book to adolescents. It is well written and interesting

          A book that is, as I’ve clearly shown, riddled with errors of fact, is not “well written”. It’s garbage.

          A good book in a series of excellent books by him.

          A book that is, as I’ve clearly shown, riddled with errors of fact, is not “a good book”. It’s garbage.

          1. Yes, I have my opinion, but do not have a need to argue disrespectfully.
            RD’s book may have mistakes, but overall still a good book. I cannot follow your argument that you have “clearly shown” anything that discredits the whole book. Simply not true.
            It’s definitely not garbage even though you seem to whish that.

          2. Yes, I have my opinion, but do not have a need to argue disrespectfully.

            Respect is earned. So is scorn. If you say silly things, you’ll get scorn, not respect.

            RD’s book may have mistakes, but overall still a good book.

            A book with arguments based on fundamental errors of fact is not a “good book”. It’s a bad book.

            I cannot follow your argument that you have “clearly shown” anything that discredits the whole book.

            It’s not exactly a hard argument to follow: a book with arguments based on fundamental errors of fact is not a “good book”. It’s a bad book. Do I need to repeat this a third time?

  19. “Dawkins also has a internet atheist’s weak grasp of how Jewish exegesis works. He notes that gMatt refers to Isaiah 7:14 as a prophecy of Jesus’ birth to a virgin, but he then argues:”

    “In fact, the writer of gMatt would have been very aware of the context of the Isaiah text he uses. What Dawkins does not seem to understand is that exegesis of this kind involves taking a text out of its context and highlighting a second meaning for it. So, for the gMatt author, Isaiah 7:14 had one meaning in its context, but a second and different meaning on its own.”

    Well, you’re right. I do see this point a lot online on atheist websites and blogs, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad point. Atheists point it out after Christians point it out.

    The Christians starts by saying something like : “See! Look! The virgin birth of Jesus was predicted hundreds of years before by God in the OT! And Matthew tells us why in his book. This could not be possible unless the Bible is God’s word!”

    At this point we point out that the prophecy is not a prophecy into the distant future, and that almah is not even a Hebrew word that refers explicitly to virginity. At this point Christians get upset and want to insist that the OT speaks in mysterious double meanings when talking about prophecies (which isn’t true), thus backing us into an irrefutable corner. In other words, they want us to think that the OT prophesied something thousands of years ago that is clearly a retroactive understanding of a 21st century evangelical.

    So we’re not really concerned with Mathew’s interpretation of the text. We’re just not convinced that the OT has future predicting abilities like some Christians insist. I have no problems against Christians who have a mystical, double-meaning understanding of the Bible, but the moment they insist that its “fulfilled prophecy” or that the Bible is true because it can predict hundreds of years into the future is crossing a line.

    1. So we’re not really concerned with Mathew’s interpretation of the text.

      Dawkins is. My article is about what Dawkins says in his book.

    2. And Dawkins is not exactly the only atheist concerned with interpreting the Holy Bible. At Patheos there is for instance a blog called Atheology. Personally I find it pathetic when atheists do this; as if their unbelief depends on correct exegesis. Why would I care who is right, Ken Ham from AIG or Karl Barth? Or some educated cardinal at the Vatican?
      The exception is of course professional interest of scholars, who try to understand how people thought back then. That has little, if anything to do with the god-question in the 21st Century.

      1. I think this is a bit harsh. It’s wise to know your enemy, and understand what you criticise.

        I stopped taking Dawkins seriously when I realised that his attacks on Christianity rested on lots of straw men and pretty horrendous misunderstandings of what most Christians believe. I’m not saying he would suddenly convert if he were better informed, but at least it would be a starting point for a discussion. As it is, I struggle to take his arguments in good faith.

        1. The Bible is not my enemy and I don’t feel any need or urge to criticize it. I don’t care what the Bible says, with the one exception I already mentioned. Today’s relevance of the Bible is simply not my problem, exactly because I’m not a christian.

  20. “one of our greatest explainers, thinkers and writers”

    I’m unsure if this is bashing the quality of everybody else or if it’s just ludicrous self-worship. No offense to Dawkins but he is NOT on that level. He fails terribly at everything that isn’t biology. Biology itself he’s barely involved in nowadays. E. O. Wilson, one of the biggest names in biology today, called Dawkins a journalist. Who wrote that description?

  21. I don’t know why he’d want to make the Ziusudra flood myth more similar to Noah. Creationists tout multiple flood myths as evidence of Noah, so saying another older source tells exactly the same story would just confirm that.
    The real Ziusudra story is interestingly different. Though the flood, ark, and the progression of releasing birds three times to discover land are all still there, those aboard the ark are more than Ziusudra’s own family, and instead of sons, he has a daughter. He, his wife, their daughter, and the helmsman are all apotheosized.

    It would have been a stronger argument to say, “Ziusudra is obviously an older form of the flood narrative in Genesis as evidenced by the flood, ark, and birds. However, the Ziusudra version is predates Genesis by centuries, and has notable differences. The hero is not Noah but Ziusudra, a name so different it can’t possible be a different spelling. Ziusudra took more than his family into the ark, and has one daughter, not three sons as in Genesis. He, his daughter, and the helmsman are also apotheosized. Absent is the “bow in the clouds”. All this together shows that Genesis cannot be an exact historical account as it is definitely based on the same story, but the older version contains many details contradicted by Genesis, (daughter, passengers outside the family) contains details left out by Genesis (Apotheosis of the family) and lacks details like a bow in the clouds. This shows that things were changed or taken away from the story, and other things did not actually happen, but were added in later.”
    That would have been factual, and done a better job casting doubt on scripture.

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  22. @FrankB, I’m sorry for answering half a year later, I didn’t read it so probably you won’t read my answer but regardless.
    Believe me, I know all of that, I understand the scientific method and the problem of induction. It was simply a problem of wording, by “minimum certainty” I simply wanted to mean that I wanted to understand why are those conclusions considered the best ones even if the uncertainty that we have about this time period is very high, to say it roughly, even if they are probably considerably wrong.

  23. 2 Thoughts:
    “Noah story comes directly from a Babylonian myth, the legend of Utnapishtim” Would you say Dawkins is correct on this or is this just another failed argument that many atheists make when trying to argue that Genesis “stole” from ancient Mesopotamian myths, kind of like the same way that many Jesus Mythicists will try to claim that Jesus was “stolen” from ancient deities like Horus, Attis, Dionysus etc. when the actual history is much more complicated than that.

    Also, you said that “The first time it was discussed in any council at all was at the local synod at Hippo in 393 AD”, but wasn’t it also discussed at earlier councils like the Council of Rome in 382?

    1. “Would you say Dawkins is correct on this or is this just another failed argument that many atheists make when trying to argue that Genesis “stole” from ancient Mesopotamian myths”

      I’d say you should read what I say next after the part you quoted from me.

      “wasn’t it also discussed at earlier councils like the Council of Rome in 382?”

      That’s not clear. A canon attributed to that council circulated later but it not certain if the Council of Rome was its genuine origin or just a later attribution.

  24. 1. Yes but everything you said after the quote only dealt with certain aspects of the Noah story and the Gilgamesh story. You didn’t deal with his claim that one was based off of the other, only that certain claims about the two stories are wrong. My question was with regards to Dawkins’s statement about the claim of Noah’s story being derived directly from the Gilgamesh flood story; You only dealt with certain aspects that he gets wrong about the story, not the claim itself.
    2. I’m unaware of that so I’ll have to do more research on that but thanks for your response.

  25. So you said that they “tell versions of the same story”. Were you referring to the Noah story AND the Gilgamesh story, that THEY tell versions of the same story, or just the Gilgamesh story and other Mesopotamian myths that also talk about a flood that they share?

    1. I don’t understand that question. There were a number of flood stories in the area that seem to be related. That’s it.

  26. Sorry, I probably could have made that question clearer. My question basically was what does the “they” refer to? My point was that there were a number of flood myths in ancient Mesopotamia, with the Noah’s ark story included, that seem to share a common source, not that one was deliberately derived from the other, and that seemed to be your point. My question was are the Gilgamesh story and the other Mesopotamian myths from that region telling versions of the same story or are ONLY the Noah’s ark story and the Gilgamesh story telling versions of the same story, because that would’ve cleared it up. You can look at it two different ways. I don’t want to make this complicated but my question is kind of complicated. Is your position that Noah’s ark shares a common source with the other Mesopotamian myths because that seems to be it.

  27. Speaking of Dan Brown… Tim have you read the book “The Da Vinci Hoax: Exposing the Errors in The Da Vinci Code” by Carl E. Olson anda Sandra Miesel? I would like to know if you think a reliable book. Some comments on Goodreads allege that the author of the book has a “religious bias” and that he is very hostile towards Dan Brown (I don’t know if this last allegation is a bad thing considering the content of the book “Da Vinci”).

    1. I read that one years ago and did find it was coming from a particularly conservative Christian perspective. I can’t say I blame anyone who loves history being hostile towards Dan Brown, however, since the guy single-handedly boosted or started a plethora of historical myths. I think Bart Ehrman’s book on the claims in The Da Vinci Code is the best, though my old website History vs The Da Vinci Code has been found to be useful by many people as well.

      1. Oh i got it. So I’m taking this book off my list. I found this book while I was looking for someone to clarify that Pope Gregory I did not spread the idea that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. I accessed his homily on Roger Pearse’s website and reading other articles I found that they decontextualized an excerpt from this homily so that it seemed that he simply associated Madalena with a prostitute. Reading the whole homily it is understood that he used rhetoric to describe it as the bridge of Christ so he didn’t want to defame her or anything like that. this book by bart ehrman was already on my list. I will read your article. Thanks!

        1. Sorry Tim. Here I am again. I just saw that Tom Holland was going to talk about “the da vinci code” and he was going to talk about a book by Michael Baigent. I had no idea that there was any “connection” between these two authors. I had a baigent book on my list called “The inquisition” and after knowing that baigent is “similar” to Dan brown I am in doubt if I should continue with this book on my list. I had already considered removing it from the list because I saw that Bernard Hamilton didn’t like his book, but even so I wanted to draw my own conclusions and I kept it, but now I’m in doubt if I remain with this book on the list. What do you think? Should I take the book off the list?

          1. Baigent is an idiot and a gullible conspiracy theorist and not a scholar. Avoid anything he writes completely. Stick to actual scholars, not amateur crackpots.

  28. About the history of the Flood Dawkins could have come up with a reasonable explanation. There was once a Ice Age, and men lived in it. Eventually the Ice Age ended and there was a lot of ice in the lands that began to melt. Well, melted ice is water, and water has to go somewhere.

    So there were plenty of floods and every human group that surived it would remember it and tell it to the children. There is no need to listen to the stories of other groups, they have their own story.

    But Dawkins does not have much common sense.

  29. Hi, Tim. Can I call you that?

    I have two questions:

    1. When it comes to the absence of evidence fallacy, how is it appropriate? I know you’re an atheist but say someone were to say that aliens resurrected Jesus and we couldn’t prove otherwise due to this fallacy, how would you respond?

    2. This is more of a question fueled by my frustration. How is it that arguments like the ones by people like the Four Horsemen of New Atheism become so popular? They argue things like this and other things like “blind faith”, “Jesus mythicism” and so on. It shakes my confidence due to how popular they end up being. It makes me think “What if they’re right?”

    1. Regarding (1) I’d respond by saying that proposing alternatives that are mere suppositions based on nothing but imaginary “maybes” is not the basis for any kind of coherent hypothesis.
      Regarding (2), I think only you can answer that one.

  30. So, Dawkins is claiming that Irenaeus, who died in 202, decided on the four gospels, which were chosen at the Council of Nicaea in 325. Does Dawkins believe in necromancy or am I missing something?

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