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Kitchen is fringe

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"Kenneth Kitchen, one of our greatest current Archaeologists" Kenneth Kitchen is not remotely reliable when it comes to Biblical history. The man has a serious bias: "Kitchen is an evangelical Christian, and has published frequently defending the historicity of the Old Testament. He is an outspoken critic of the documentary hypothesis, publishing various articles and books upholding his viewpoint, arguing from several kinds of evidence for his views showing that the depictions in the Bible of various historical eras and societies are consistent with historical data." In other words, Wikipedia:Fringe theories applies. In general evangelical pseudo-scholars should be distinguished from reliable, secular sources. Dimadick (talk) 13:01, 23 September 2018 (UTC)

I think Kitchen comes up so often in these sorts of discussions because he's a serious, credible scholar on Egypt but super-maximalist on ancient Israel and the Bible. It's like a trained rocket scientist opposing evolution -- the rhetorical gambit used is to transfer credibility from one field onto another one. That and his avoidance of full-blown Young-Earth-Creationism can create an impression that his works on the Bible are somehow mainstream. Alephb (talk) 19:24, 23 September 2018 (UTC)

@Oakes777: Please read the above. You are expected to abide by the website guideline WP:FRINGE.

Besides, nobody has denied that the Aramaic from the Book of Daniel is much older than Antiochus Epiphanes was. But that it a red herring, since nobody could prevent the author of that book from copying from a document containing older legends.

And I can grant the point that the consensus for JEDP is crumbling, but it is being replaced by views even more inimical to Kitchen, rather than by views more friendly to Kitchen. If he thinks that JEDP is wanton, then for him the present-day mainstream views are Helter Skelter. Of course, I am talking about the academic mainstream, not about people who weren't educated in Bible scholarship, and not about fundamentalist scholars. tgeorgescu (talk) 06:21, 8 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I think what needs to be emphasized here is that you can't give this undue weight. Newer editors generally don't understand that it's not that fringe information cannot be included at all, but that it has to be properly attributed and that it must be noted as a theory that is not broadly supported by scholarship in its field. Also, dropping it as a primary source in this way is Original Research (WP:NOR. "How" it is written and "what" is said is important. In other words, as @Tgeorgescu noted above, you actually have to read WP:FRINGE thoroughly. And what was added did not meet several guidelines other than FRINGE and would have been removed or severely edited even if it was something else (WP:OR, WP:EDITORIAL, WP:WEASEL, and citation MOS to name a few). ButlerBlog (talk) 13:23, 8 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I dispute the neutrality of the article

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Whoever wrote the sections saying referring to the dating of the Gospels is clearly trying to push late dating and non-eyewitness authorship. Please rework to make it NPOV. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.231.143.5 (talk) 20:18, 5 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

WP:NPOV means WP:NOTNEUTRAL. We kowtow to WP:RS/AC: in any major US university it is taught that the NT gospels are fundamentally anonymous. And that they were written at least 30 or 40 years after Jesus died.
Kowtow indeed, and agenda, doubly so. It's an agenda because your own declaration, right here, DOES NOT discredit the Synoptic Gospels being comprised of many anonymous, first-party sources. Larry Sanger noted that the greatest mistake in Wikipedia's development was its rejection of neutrality and its embrace of the notion of "equal weight." The concept of "undue weight" naturally produces a bias in favor of the zeitgeist of academia. This appears both in obvious situations (e.g. heliocentrism) and in political ones. In this article's case, the "no one who contributed to the Gospels, ever, were eyewitnesses of the Christ in any capacity" argument is so disingenuous, and so fabricated, that it is propaganda. NO ONE, and I do mean no one, disagrees that the Gospels were largely anonymous and compiled of many, many authors over several decades after Jesus died. I don't even disagree with that as a practicing Christian. Again, though, that is not what the article says. --107.203.166.49 (talk) 19:21, 4 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

So, to answer your charge: this is not a bug, it's a feature. tgeorgescu (talk) 11:06, 6 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
There are other points of view. "In any major university" ... weasel words. 63.231.143.5 (talk) 03:02, 18 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
No, really: if there is a US state university which teaches for a fact that NT gospels are not fundamentally anonymous, that would be a wonder (meaning a full professor teaches it to its students, as opposed to being taught by some fleeting teaching assistant). If there is an Ivy League university which does that, it would be a wonder of wonders.
If you're not yet convinced, see Ham, Ken; Hall, Greg; Beemer, Britt (2011). Already Compromised. Master Books. ISBN 978-0-89051-607-2. And Ham, Ken; Beemer, Britt; Hillard, Todd (2009). Already Gone: Why your kids will quit church and what you can do to stop it. New Leaf Publishing Group, Incorporated. ISBN 978-1-61458-003-4.
These might sound like conspiracy theories, but the basic facts are true: WP:SCHOLARSHIP, meaning Bible scholarship, has moved a lot from the position of the fundamentalist/traditionalist Christian true believer. tgeorgescu (talk) 15:23, 19 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Regardless of whether the statement is true it's irrelevant to the article and sticks out from the context of the rest of the section drawing undue attention to itself. Please remove. 74.98.214.45 (talk) 22:12, 12 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The dates of the gospels are highly relevant: the "abomination" they talk about is connected with the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, and the four were all written during or after that event (although Mark might have been slightly before). Achar Sva (talk) 21:17, 13 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

"a future eschatological (i.e., end-time) event,"

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This question probably ties into the discussion section immediately above this, but: the text as we have it has a contradiction that seems rooted in disagreements over the time of the composition of the Gospels. Basically we say that the New Testament use of the phrase is in the context of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem. Modern academic consensus has Matthew and Luke, and probably Mark, as being composed after 70 AD (indeed, the passages in Mark are often taken as evidence that it can't have been composed in earlier than 70). However, we muddle the waters with a sentence (written twice, once in the lede and one in the article body) saying "in all three [gospels] it is likely that the authors had in mind a future eschatological (i.e., end-time) event, and perhaps the activities of some antichrist."

While we're not coming right out and saying it explicitly in that sentence, we seem to be saying that Jesus (or the writers of the Gospels) are predicting a future in these passages that would've been otherwise unknown to them; but the rest of the article seems to work on the assumption that in fact post-70 writers are alluding to the events of 70 (which they obviously would've known about from experience) in a passage where the narrative action takes place before 70, making it look like a prediction/prophecy. This is basically the same structure of what's happening in the Book of Daniel, when people in the 160s BC wrote a story taking place in the 4th century BC that alludes to/"predicts" events that the writers had already experienced.

My understanding is that the academic consensus is that, basically, people writing after 70 AD put a "prophecy" into Jesus's mouth in the Gospels of events that writers had already seen come to pass; I realize that for people who believe the Gospels are more-or-less accurate descriptions of what Jesus said and did, this is a problematic interpretation. If nothing else, we should make clear that we are talking about two different interpretations of the passages here, e.g., "[Source X/Y/Z] believes these passages were written after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and allude to it, while [Source Q] says that these are eschatological passages alluding to a predicted future antichrist's activities." But I wanted to see if I could get to some consensus here before wading into the article and starting to edit. --Jfruh (talk) 22:23, 11 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Deliberate Misrepresentation of Gospel Anonymity Into Zero First-Party Witnesses

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The intentional rewriting of the scholarly belief that "the Gospels were written over several decades by many men, mostly anonymous" into "the Gospels' authors never saw Jesus, ever," is malicious propaganda designed to take jabs at Christendom. The explicit and intended purpose is to delegitimize the Gospels' account, rather than stating the fact that multiple men wrote them besides their namesakes, if their namesakes wrote anything at all. Indeed, deliberately claiming that all of the the Gospels as being written when all witnesses of Jesus had died, and that no one who contributed saw Jesus, is designed to undermine any credibility they had. It is the same intellectual dishonesty that claims Jesus never existed, and that He was a fabrication. "The Gospels have ZERO first-party sources" is propaganda, not fact, as opposed to "the namesakes of the Gospels were not the sole authors and the Gospels were compiled over decades."

What the article does is deliberately misinterpret the fact that much of the Gospels were almost certainly written by men who were not the Gospels' titular writers, into propaganda that no first-party accounts of Jesus exist in Christendom. Instead, it fabricates the absolute lie, one as laughable as "Jesus did not exist," that the Gospels have zero basis in the actual events they feature. Whoever penned this had an overt, even hateful agenda. I doubt any man would dare say this about the Qu'ran without fear of his execution: there is no one, ever, who asserts that the men who compiled the Qu'ran were not eyewitnesses to Muhammad's conquests, and no one doubts the legitimacy of the secular aspects of the accounts. This stands in Christendom as well: first-party sources directly contributed to the Gospels.

The consensus I've seen over the years is that Mark was the first and oldest Gospel, dating to as early as 45-50 AD. The rest of the Synoptic Gospels were written about thirty to forty years after Jesus' Death and Resurrection. The Gospel of John was written around 100 AD and had the least first-party sources (and was probably from oral tradition in several chunks), largely because it focused on theological elements and natures of the Godhead and Co-Eternity of God the Son, as in John 1.

It is almost universally believed that the Gospels had more than one author. I've never seen anyone in academia not say this. Matthew, Mark, Like, and John were, in some manner, contributors, but by no means the sole authors, and the assertion that the Gospels were collections of eyewitness accounts from those alive at Jesus' time is not disputed. No one believes one man sat down and wrote them at once, and no one questions this consensus that many people wrote the Gospels.

However, that's not what the criticized writing says. Men defending the propagandic statement say "no college on earth disagrees that the Gospels are fundamentally anonymous," which is a correct statement, and also NOT what the propaganda said.

The man who wrote this passage had deliberate, malicious intent that is in no way reflective of the idea that the Gospels did not have one author, and were not compiled all at once. We simply cannot assume good faith, espectially when everyone making the argument in its favor is literally making the argument that the Gospels had several anonymous arguments. The statement being challenged does not say that; it says no one who contributed to the Gospels, NO ONE, ever saw Jesus in any capacity. It is a denial of the Gospels as first-party sources in any capacity, and is a farce I'd sooner see on Reddit than a cite claiming to be encyclopedic. You might as well pretend Jesus never actually existed at all.

The correct wording of the sentence is this:

"It is almost certain that most of the contributors of the Gospels were both diverse and fundamentally anonymous, and that the passage in Mark, the earliest Gospel, was a point of reference for 'abomination of desolation' by the authors of Matthew and Luke."

To say otherwise is to reject the very sources cited in the article.

--107.203.166.49 (talk) 19:29, 4 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Reddish 2011, p. 13: "This assumption is often coupled with the beliefs that the authors of the four Gospels were eyewitnesses of the events they narrate and that the composition of the Gospels was a relatively simple process of preserving in writing what they had seen and heard firsthand. Such assumptions about the Gospels, however, are inaccurate. [...] The authors of the Gospels, or at least the persons responsible for the final form of the Gospels, were almost certainly not eyewitnesses; and the Gospels themselves are the end products of traditions that were transmitted and preserved in various forms, both oral and written."
The mainstream academic view is: Oral gospel traditions.
Another argument: Christianity began as a religion about the death and resurrection of Jesus. Initially, it wasn't a religion about the teachings of Jesus. Those weren't its core message. tgeorgescu (talk) 20:21, 4 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]