King Herod’s Tomb
Posted by Kushana Torumekia at 5/14/2007 9:45 PM 
Categories: Josephus, New Testament, Atheism, History, Canonical Gospels, Archaeology, Contemporary Religion, Buddhism
Categories: Josephus, New Testament, Atheism, History, Canonical Gospels, Archaeology, Contemporary Religion, Buddhism
Listen to this article
A few recent archaeological discoveries have been on my mind, lately: the announcement of the discovery of King Herod's tomb (smashed and minus Herod), the announcement of the discovery of Anthony and Cleopatra's tombs we can finally settle the debate over what she looked like), and the re-publication of a known tomb containing someone named Joshua (among others) - ballyhooed as the Tomb of Jesus.
Both Christians and atheists (there are more people in the world than these two groups, but I mean people with a spiritual stake in these matters one way or the other) tend to do strange things with history when such discoveries are announced. Think a moment: does the fact that Anthony and Cleopatra lived make Shakespeare's play any more accurate a work of history? Does the fact that Pontius Pilate or the Emperor Augustus or King Herod lived make the Gospels any more accurate as works of history? Does whether Jesus existed or not?
For a historian the existence of a person and the portrayal of a person (think Alexander the Great or Charlemagne) are two different matters.
Josephus gives the leader of the Jewish defenders of the fortress at Masada a splendid speech conforming to the best literary standards for public speaking in Josephus' day. It was common for Greek and Roman biographers and historians to invent what contemporary historians call 'speeches in character' and to freely portray the life-events and words of notable people to illustrate what the ancient author wanted them to be: usually moral, spiritual, or philosophical examples for their readers. (Nearly every long speech in the Book of Acts by the author of Luke's Gospel is one of these speeches in character - very rhetorical, very polished, and aimed at quickly galvanizing the reader's opinion of that figure (who, in Luke's hands, is more a literary character than a historical snapshot....))
Neither ancient historians nor ancient readers had public records, newspapers, tv, museums (in the modern sense of the word), the internet, or tape recorders. The concept of an interview was unknown. I can think of no discoveries of civic archives in the era of Christianity's beginnings (if my memory has failed me, please point me to what has slipped my mind) and I can think of only a very few references to any such thing. (The much older civic archives we have deal in quantities of taxes and temple offerings and in surveys of farmland - but Antiquity had no way to identify people in any standard, centralized way. There is no mention of the tax in Nativity except in that Gospel, and most historians conclude it is a literary device to transport Mary and Joseph to the appropriate place.)
Also, neither ancient historians nor readers seemed to have much real concern for this kind of research or verification - some works do say they are accurate, but I think that is more a rhetorical device intended to mean "and readers should pay sharp attention to the edifying nature of this work." (The insistence, in modern times, that the oral literature called "the urban legend" is true and one heard it straight from someone reliable or close to the events works in the same way - it heightens the effect of the story and sharpens its moral (i.e. "don't be stupid like the woman who _____".) Christianity did not go looking for the places and relics of Jesus' life for centuries, and I can think of no examples within the first three hundred years of its history of anyone seeking out who had known Jesus or any attempt to visit the Roman province of Palestine in order to research what was said about Jesus and his first followers - people in Antiquity evidently just didn't think that way. Some ancient readers would compare new things to what they already knew on a topic, or they would consider whether they liked and otherwise agreed with those putting that work forward - but generally works purporting to be by or about a historical figure or ancient worthy were taken at their word.
(I am not saying people in Antiquity were stupid - they thought a bit differently and theirs was an oral culture. We tend to be the same way about urban legends, celebrity gossip, rumors about current events, and anything else passed by word of mouth or mass-forwarded emails.)
This does not mean that everything that ancient historians or biographers wrote (the two genres Acts and the four Gospels modeled themselves on) was made up from whole cloth. But modern historians keep a sharp eye out for literary conventions and popular types of rhetoric (higher education in the Roman era consisted of an education in public speaking (and writing) in order to tug at the emotions of an audience.) They also look for second and third sources of information, whether literary or archaeological. For a modern historian the fact that Pilate, Herod, and Jesus existed means that the New Testament authors did not get the basic background of their setting wildly wrong. (We do not think any of the gospel authors were writing from Israel - some of them make errors of geography and custom (and with Aramaic) that make this less likely, and their issues and interests often reflect a later time in Christian history that do not match what we know of James and Peter in Jerusalem.)
I could write an account of the founder of any modern religion and have the basic names and local geography correct - but that alone would not tell you whether I'd written something wildly tenditious and slanderous, or whether I'd written a devout hagiography, or whether I'd written a neutral journalistic account. In theological language, the first is a polemic, the second is theology within that particular religion, and the third isn't theology, at all. That's the separation I'm trying to put across about the announcement of these archaeological discoveries: the Roman provincial setting checks out, but that fact, by itself, leaves a host of questions about each New Testament author's resources, intent, and aim wide open.
I do not think religious ideas can be validated or invalidated by historical accuracy or inaccuracy. Certainly alert readers can watch the accounts of a religion's founder, promulgators, early followers and accounts of the building of religious monuments or houses of worship for the toolmarks of theology - for the miraculous and superlative. But a theological idea - an idea about one of the ultimate questions or proffered by a supranatural source - must be evaluated in other ways. The nature of the Pure Land, for example, is not affected by the historicity of Siddhartha Gautama - that leaves plenty of room for arguing about it in every way under the sun, from Buddhist and non-Buddhist perspectives. But now that the idea is up and running in Buddhism, it is part of that religion and open for consideration by everyone whether they belong to that tradition or not.
-Kushana
Comments