Lol.

Dennis,

Me, I got no problem. Except it gives me pain to follow a quarrel where people appear to be speaking the same language but have different definitions for the words, so cannot understand one another. Communication is one of those things evolution has not had much opportunity to refine, so we stumble around in the dark stepping on toes.

Richard has the unfortunate fate of working where he frequently bumps into people who pretend, but don’t actually want to communicate. If somebody seems to sound like one of them, the wrong habits are provoked, and hilarity ensues. The Marx Brothers used to make movies about that.

So I got what you meant: effectively all the evidence we have tells us what elites in major population centers thought, because that is where there were people to write it down. So, anything we deduce from it is, implictly, really about what those particular Jews thought, plus some unknown fraction of the rest.

The modal argument, that we can be certain that some fraction of Jews in the area believed a thing because some of those wrote it down and we have that, is a subtlety that even the pros seem sometimes unable to grasp, or even are determined not to grasp. But we can be certain anybody who claims none believed that thing are wrong, even given the patchiest surviving evidence.

Richard wasn’t interested, here, in what all Jews believed, so I guess was confused as to why you insisted on talking about it and so mistook your intentions. Given what he has experienced from people who should have behaved like colleagues, and still frequently does experience, I think he deserves a pass.

re: “…you absolutely did say the things I criticized you for”.

Never once said I didn’t. I just didn’t CARE. It was clear that either I was a failure at communicating what I was criticizing YOU for, or, you just weren’t going to acknowledge and respond to what I was criticizing you for. So, I blew it off. Whatever the “problem in communication” was, it just didn’t matter. I just lost interest. There was no point in trying to explain/clarify my views when my attempts at clarification/explanation were, themselves, not going to be understood as attempts at clarifications.

re: “Had you merely said what you are now rewriting history as if you said, my response would have been entirely different.”

OH, WELL, THEN — let’s all just say I did a really, super-incomprehensibly-bad job of making clear what my “issue” was, and let’s just say that my “rewrite of history” is what I REALLY meant to get at, but did a piss-poor job of. Let’s just go with that. So – that being the case – what IS your “entirely different response”?

Dennis (or now, I guess, “Aussie Stockman”?), you absolutely did say the things I criticized you for.

Had you merely said what you are now rewriting history as if you said, my response would have been entirely different.

If all you really want to complain about is that “some” Jews may have had different ideas, my reply then would be: that does not matter to any argument I have ever made. All my argument requires is that “many” Jews thought what I described. To which “some Jews thought differently” is not even a reply. It’s irrelevant.

Of course, you also have presented no evidence of these “some” Jews thinking differently. Which is a problem for you. But its moot if all you meant was “some must have,” as that’s still admitting the only premise I have ever affirmed: that “many” thought as I described.

You can’t claim no Americans are Christians because some Americans are atheists. Likewise you can’t claim no Jews thought the things I document because some Jews had different ideas. Nor does the existence of alternative ideas have any bearing on anything I have ever argued.

If, instead, you wish to merely make a frivolous complaint about “how many” Jews thought as I document, however, then you are back in trouble again. All the evidence (literally all of it) confirms what I document. No evidence (literally none of it) supports any alternative point of view being in any way popular among Jewish intellectuals of the relevant period.

Nice. And yes, well observed.

Nathan —

All I was EVER objecting to was what appeared to me as an OVERSTATEMENT by Richard.

I’ve NEVER disagreed with what he was saying about “In antiquity, in Judaism God is a being who lives in an actual house in outer space, somewhere in between the orbit of Saturn and the outer stars… ”

The fact that the concept he describes about WAS a Jewish belief of antiquity is NOT, and never has been, objected to by me. I’m sure the ancient Jews had LOTS of different ideas about “where God lives”.

What I objected to was just the way Richard seemed – to me, at any rate – to say that this particular concept of God was somehow, and necessarily, THE de facto Jewish belief. But, I don’t think there has EVER been a truly homogenous Jewish belief about God.

It became very clear to me that Richard could not “get” that I was objected to what I felt was “overstating a case” — so,, I just blew it off. I felt like I was trying to communicate with a brick wall.

You? I got no idea what your problem is.

But, thanks for citing me.

,

People like DENNIS, and they are legion, need frequent reminders that scholarship is necessarily about artifacts that exist and can be cited, not speculation. A delightfully downmarket naturalist, Lindsay Nikole, with a youtube channel (which see) offers merch with the prominent slogan “That We Know Of”, which she repeats frequently in her scripts because she knows her audience needs the reminder that pros don’t.

Could you articulate how that observation applies to anything discussed here?

For historians, it would be debilitating to note on every other line that we know nothing about what 99.99999% of ancient people thought, but only what those few thought whose writing survived. It is usually pointless to discuss what anybody whose writing didn’t survive thought unless somebody wrote about that.

Speaking with the general public, it is always important to remind them that we are only talking about what we can know about: Yes, people whose writings, if any, didn’t survive thought all kinds of things we can’t usefully discuss. Some probably thought almost anything you can think of, plus lots else you can’t. That is a topic of speculation, something legitimate historians usually don’t get to indulge in.

All the sources we have appear to indicate (if they inform us at all) that spherical cosmology, a development of Hellenistic science, had thoroughly taken over literate Judaism by the time Christianity began.

There is no evidence of flat-earthism among literate Jews then. Pliny the Elder attests only illiterate people maintained it, even against being “told off” by educated persons, and we have only one documented example of a literate flat-earther, the Christian tutor of Constantine’s sons, Lactantius, and he gives the impression of being an outsider arguing against his peers on the point.