extra-biblical legends

[pakeha]

Yet another reason to kill brats, then?

I believe this whole line of nonsense started with the United Church of God and their house rag The Good News which regularly used supposed extra-biblical "evidence" to shore up their beliefs. ...

So much to learn...

 

[GrandMasterFox]

It was baldness (I'm sure it was just a typo on your part) and the apologetic version I read was that they were not kids but rather "youths" and old enough and in large enough quantities that he felt his life was in danger.

OOPSI! Yes, typo indeed
There are of course any number of silly apologetic responses to that horrifying issue a lot of them completely contradictory (as any fan fiction).
I can provide links, but most of my sources are in hebrew.

Though that is one of the dumbest explanations it's of course, as I said, not the only one. And just to explain how dumb some of them are:

For those who don't know, quite often the rabies go out of a basic assumption that the bible is divinely inspired and therefore not a single word is out of place. In other words, if something seems "redundant" it's not and there's a hidden meaning.

He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys.

The (no pun intended) bold part is where the rabbies had issues. Why did the bible have to say that he looked at the boys?

One rabbi claimed that ywh gave him the power of killing with a stare (like that girl from the ring) though what on earth was the point of the bears is beyond me.

Others claimed that he looked not just at them but to their inner souls (or something) and thus saw that they committed sin and sent the bears to kill them. Various inventions on what those sins were from the above mentioned their parents having sex on yom kipur, another rabbi said that the boys had "forbidden gential" haircuts and deserved to die for it... Apparently... Loving god indeed.

Another known case is a rabbi who was asked by his students if those kids deserved to die. After all, it's possible that their future offspring could be righteous. So the rabbi told them when he looked at he boys he saw their future and saw no righteous offspring so it was okay to kill them.

I'm not sure what bothers me more
1)That people consciously invent these stupid answers on the spot without acknowledging what they are doing or how much this whole thing reflects on it being total BS
2)That saying you can see in advance unborn people being totally unworthy of salvation - And still try to claim something regarding morality or free will...

<sniped>He killed a bunch of bratty little boys for impugning his masculinity.

Of course either way, I'm still shocked everytime I hear someone tries to give that. I mean does that actually make the story much better? He still slaughtered a bunch of people - Does their age really matter?

Also, while reading up a bit to refresh my memory on this issue, I noticed there was another attempt of silly apologetic to try and claim that the word "naarim" is used for geography (from the town "naor") although it seems this was rejected quickly.

 

[HansMustermann]

Well, what bothers me, in case it wasn't clear, is precisely the delusion that someone can just invent their own unfounded delusion, out of thin air, based on no more than that it would be more palatable to them that a story which says "black" means "white", AND take it as, basically, therefore it is so. WTH?

 

[GrandMasterFox]

Well, what bothers me, in case it wasn't clear, is precisely the delusion that someone can just invent their own unfounded delusion, out of thin air, based on no more than that it would be more palatable to them that a story which says "black" means "white", AND take it as, basically, therefore it is so. WTH?

Because god inspired him to make the right decision?

 

[TimCallahan]

One reason for all the commentaries, midrashes and targums is, I suspect, that the Bible isn't a single book. Rather, it's a library. Not only that, it's a library that's been written over a period of centuries. In that time span, the worship of Yahweh went from being that of a limited, henotheistic deity with a wife and a small pantheon to that of a universal, all-powerful monotheistic deity. Thus later writers were confronted with ancient books full of all sorts of sex and violence. Thus, they had to reconfigure these books to fit their new beliefs. Hence, the targum saying explicitly that Ruth and Boaz did not do the wild thing on the threshing floor before they were married. Likewise, the Song of songs, which is about physical love, had to be reconfigured by Christian apologists, in particular, to be a metaphor of God's love for the church.

Finally, we have the fact that even the monotheistic sections of the Bible countenance such things as slavery and invoking the death sentence for, not only sex outside of marriage, but, as well, for the comparatively minor infraction of showing disrespect for one's elders. Faced with the disconnect between the biblical view and our own, more civilized, set of ethics, Modern commentators have to resort to the invention of turning bratty little boys into menacing gang-bangers in order to justify Elisha invoking a death sentence on them.

 

[HansMustermann]

TBH that's one reason I brought fanboyism -- or should I say, Fan Dumb -- into it. I see people doing the same every day without even having the divine inspiration excuse.

Basically, fan X doesn't like that his favourite comic, or anime series, or movie, or computer game or whatever says or portrays a trait or event Y. Maybe it doesn't fit his idealized, and invariably wrong, idea of what it really portrays or should portray. E.g., maybe people remain unconvinced when he insists that a comic created in the 50's is about the USA justifying their invasion of Iraq some half a century later. Or maybe he feels that other people don't have the appreciation he expects them to have for the character that he's worshiping. E.g., that character was given enough anti-hero traits to make him almost indistinguishable morally from the villain, in a grey-vs-grey setting, and people keep pointing out those flaws or *gasp* actually pointing out that it's grey-vs-grey and not one knight in shiny armour vs the incarnation of all evil, instead of being just as awe-struck by that character's awesomeness as he is. Etc.

So, anyway, the canon says Y and fanboy X doesn't like that one bit. So he proceeds to start ten threads to argue why Y never happened. Or it really means Z. Or that prior events A, B and C that he just pulled out of the butt, totally change Y or its moral aspects into something completely different.

As far as I can tell, the only checking against "reality" happening for these guys is that if Z is more palatable to them, it must be true.

And you can really find examples in any domain, from novels to movies to comics to computer games. The less important it is for anyone else whether Bowser is really the villain or a misunderstood hero of the old 8-bit Mario games, the more effort someone out there will put into making sue everyone understands that Bowser is the hero.

I suppose that, yeah, some of them WOULD claim divine inspiration if they could.

But really, I'm not the impression that atonement or attuning with a higher power is the actual motivation. Someone is just obsessing over some fiction character or series, and is going to invent anything it takes to make that character closer to their idealized image, or respectively to sell that fanboyism to others.

But at any rate, it doesn't make the idea that someone thinks he can just invent reality, or that whatever he likes more somehow becomes more real, any less scary.

 

[TimCallahan]

Not only are characters, such as Mary Magdalene, Pontius Pilate and Salome, the subject of extra-biblical elaboration; so, too, are various sacred relics. Among the most mythologized of these is the spear used to pierce the side of Jesus. Here is an overview, including photos of various spears and lances supposed to be the spear. One thing in common with all of these relics is that the bear little resemblance to the actual Roman lance or pilum.

One of the more absurd elaborations on the legend of this spear or lance is Trevor Ravenscroft's 1973 book Spear of Destiny, which asserted that Hitler started World War II in order to obtain the spear. According to the book, it eventually fell into the hands of Gen. George S. Patton, at which time Hitler committed suicide. One of the relics supposed to be the spear resided in Vienna until Austria was annexed into Germany just prior to the war. Patton did obtain the relic and returned to Vienna.

However Dr. Howard A. Buechner, M.D., professor of medicine at Tulane and then Louisiana State University, a retired colonel with the U.S. Army who served in World War II claims he was told by U-boat captain that the spear now in Vienna is a fake. and that the real spear was sent by Hitler to Antarctica along with other Nazi treasures, under the command of Col. Maximilian Hartmann. In 1979 Hartmann allegedly recovered the treasures, and the spear is now hidden somewhere in Europe. Of course, this hardly matters, because, even if the Vienna relic is hidden somewhere in Europe with other Nazi treasures, that relic, as note in the first paragraph of this post (second link) is not a Roman pilum, and thus is not authentic.

Even were it an authentic pilum, it would mean little, since the story of Jesus' side being pierced by a spear is a fiction invented by the author of the Gospel of John for the purpose of "fulfilling" a prophecy in in Zech. 12:10. The incident is absent from the other gospels. This is what Hans has called "fanboy fiction" to the max.

 

[HansMustermann]

Well, indeed most of those don't bear much resemblance with a Roman lance, and the episode IS fan-fiction, but the Roman lance isn't necessarily the same thing as a pilum. It's a bit more complex a topic, IMHO.

The need to use a spear against cavalry was already proven in Caesar's time, when he made his legionarii use their pila as spears against Pompeii's cavalry. The problem is that the pilum was piss poor in that role. It was a weapon with a soft iron shank, and designed to shear a pin that fixed it to the pole too, at any serious impact. It was better than a gladius against cavalry, but not by much, and typically you had one or two thrusts with it until it became useless.

There was an evolution back to using real spears, not unlike the earlier Hasta, especially against the Persians. Although especially the auxilia got to use those, if we're talking first century AD. At least at first many were still balanced to be ok for throwing too, so the lancea or longche of the auxilia still worked as a javelin, but it had a proper spear head and much more solidly fixed to the shaft.

Scroll down the page you linked to, to see some spears from the 1st century AD that clearly were normal spear heads, instead of the 2 ft shank of a pilum.

Well, that's by modern clasifications, anyway. At the time, as you probably know, they used words much more loosely, so everything you could throw could be still called a pilum with a straight face, and everything that had a sword blade could be called a gladius, and so on. So it can be a bit harder to reconstruct exactly what weapon a particular text means.

 

[TimCallahan]

Well, indeed most of those don't bear much resemblance with a Roman lance, and the episode IS fan-fiction, but the Roman lance isn't necessarily the same thing as a pilum. It's a bit more complex a topic, IMHO.

The need to use a spear against cavalry was already proven in Caesar's time, when he made his legionarii use their pila as spears against Pompeii's cavalry. The problem is that the pilum was piss poor in that role. It was a weapon with a soft iron shank, and designed to shear a pin that fixed it to the pole too, at any serious impact. It was better than a gladius against cavalry, but not by much, and typically you had one or two thrusts with it until it became useless.

There was an evolution back to using real spears, not unlike the earlier Hasta, especially against the Persians. Although especially the auxilia got to use those, if we're talking first century AD. At least at first many were still balanced to be ok for throwing too, so the lancea or longche of the auxilia still worked as a javelin, but it had a proper spear head and much more solidly fixed to the shaft.

Scroll down the page you linked to, to see some spears from the 1st century AD that clearly were normal spear heads, instead of the 2 ft shank of a pilum.
Well, that's by modern clasifications, anyway. At the time, as you probably know, they used words much more loosely, so everything you could throw could be still called a pilum with a straight face, and everything that had a sword blade could be called a gladius, and so on. So it can be a bit harder to reconstruct exactly what weapon a particular text means.

Excellent points, of course. I stand somewhat corrected. For all that, however, even though the lance heads further down on my second link were more like conventional spears, none of them, to my mind, resemble the holy relic now in the Schatzkammer in Vienna.

Interestingly, on that same site, they mention the holy lance of Antioch, supposedly discovered by crusaders besieged in that city. It inspired them to break the siege. Think what they could have done had the found the hand grenade!

 

[HansMustermann]

As I was saying, "Well, indeed most of those don't bear much resemblance with a Roman lance[/]"

But yeah, the one in Vienna is weird. It's more of a sort of a glaive than a spear, anyway, with that blade. I too have my doubts that you'd find such a model anywhere near the 1st century CE Roman Empire.

 

[Brainache]

...
One of the more absurd elaborations on the legend of this spear or lance is Trevor Ravenscroft's 1973 book Spear of Destiny, which asserted that Hitler started World War II in order to obtain the spear. According to the book, it eventually fell into the hands of Gen. George S. Patton, at which time Hitler committed suicide. One of the relics supposed to be the spear resided in Vienna until Austria was annexed into Germany just prior to the war. Patton did obtain the relic and returned to Vienna.
...

I actually read that book. About twenty years ago a co-worker lent me his copy and told me how great it was, I had to read it, it would change the way I saw the world etc etc...

Well it changed the way I saw him, I used to think he wasn't an idiot. He thought Ravenscroft's method of Historical research (ie: Close your eyes and try to imagine how it might have happened...) was brilliant, and he couldn't understand why more Historians didn't use it.