FoodBanter.com - View Single Post - no proof WAS: How to Become a Christian, Version 1.01

>From: "Bob (this one)"

>Julian9EHP wrote:
>>> From: "Bob (this one)"
>>
>>> Julian9EHP wrote:
>>
>> [ . . . ]
>>
>>>> And nothing could be spread in the days before the printing
>>>> press. (I'm following Elizabeth Eisenstein.)
>>>
>>> Funny how large populations spoke the same language. How could
>>> that happen if "nothing could be spread in the days before the
>>> printing press"?
>>
>> In fact, it was hard for the people in one village might not be
>> able to understand the other in the next county. The languages
>> were _more_ plentiful and various than in our days -- no
>> dictionaries, no pronouncing dictionaries -- and the dialects were
>> so diverse. There was a reason why priests spoke in Latin. Chaucer
>> used a dialect that his contemporary Langland would not have
>> understood, and there were countless local words. We know things
>> in English like eyan for eggs, because there was someone scholarly
>> there who could preserve that word. There were doubtless others
>> that did not.
>
>And yet, we have records that let us translate all the way back to
>Phoenicia and even prior cultures. Ancient Egypt. Written records.
>Cuneiform.

In the hands of a _very_ few. In a few cities.

>>> Could there, in fact, have been ways to spread a lot of
>>> information? Like an entire culture with its history, language
>>> and culture?

>> In the Middle Ages, the village was its own culture.
>
>Why are you confining this to the middle ages and Europe?

Because I have Pope's little knowledge. ;-) Because this is a place where the
majority of Westerners (myself included) have studied most. Because we still
have access to many artifacts of this period, including Church records,
illustrations, excavations and imprints on turf of villages destroyed by the
Plague. Because it seems to resemble many periods at many times.

>The rest of
>the world was alive and well all the time that the folks who were the
>original populations of the bible. We have vast stores of manuscripts
>from China and India. Stone tablets that are older than the original
>manuscripts of the bible.

And I would still venture that in the ancient cultures of China and India,
literacy was the preserve of a very few. There was still a very limited means
of production. (Even after China invented the printing press, it used a single
block, which got worn out after a few prints: no letter type, which meant the
block was used a few times on a single job.) Very few people had the chance of
learning the language. Competence was limited. In China, only a few could
reach the Mandarin class.

The wonderful memorization of the Ramayama -- where a village reciter could
spend a year telling the story, and start the new year with the same one --
testifies to my same point. Culture in that society was also driven by an old
story and maintained by a village locus.

>> There were travelers -- religious pilgrims, and more rarely,
>> merchants -- but most people stayed where they were put.
>
>Right. No.

>The silk road, spice trades, precious metals and gems,
>imported luxuries all have long histories. You're trying to truncate
>history to a short time span in only one place.

What?!? Precious metals and gems prove that many people used trade? Who do
you think _had_ the wherewithall to buy precious metals? Not the farmer,
however prosperous. He or she was most likely to get more land. Not even many
craftspeople were likely to get much gold.
Only the upper nobility and the very rich were able to afford to trade, and
even they used it rarely. And a rare trade increases the luxury of gold and
spices.

>> There are copied texts from antiquity, and copies of the Bible, but
>> mostly it was the Manor House or the Town. Roman culture was the
>> same, and all the way back to the first villiages.
>>
>>>> With no means of perpetuating and spreading knowledge other
>>>> than a manual copy of a book -- no magazines, no radio or TV --
>>>> a town could starve without its neighbors knowing.
>>
>>> You seem to think that there was no travel and no communications.
>>> And that the oral traditions didn't work.
>>
>> There wasn't much travel.
>
>The Romans built roads all over their empire. For travel. Persians,
>too. Chinese. The Khans. Africa. There were vast armies moving all
>over the world. When Alexander fought the Persians, there were more
>than a half-million fighters with all their support people. Of course
>there was travel.

Again you are counting the brief life and vast armies of Alexander as if that
was the life and experience of all humankind. He had the ability to muster
large groups of young men. That is what made him Alexander. But in the
places he "conquered" -- as in China, as in Africa, as in other places -- there
were countless were people lived and died and never moved on.

>> Oral traditions captured the past completely, but always casting
>> the unknown in the role of the present. People look at ancient
>> manuscripts for the fashions worn by the people
>> _where_the_manuscript_was_copied_, not in the world at large.

>This makes no sense to me.

Look at a Byzantine manuscript. In the picture, Plato wears a Byzantine
outfit. In French manuscripts, Helen wears the dress of one particular
medieval French town. (This ethnocentrism lasted very late. In Gibbons's
first editions, the plates show men and women in 18th century French outfits.
In fact, the tradition may live on in disguise in our own productions.)

>> Communications now exist independant of travel. If we can now
>> presume a man from Podunk who was born in Podunk, lives in Podunk
>> and will never travel from Podunk, we can presume the same man buys
>> cups made in China. He can turn on a TV and see his son fighting
>> in Afganistan, or his daughter looking through a window in New York
>> City. That man couldn't have done this if he had lived in Ancient
>> Rome. Ancient Israel was the small exception -- people went a
>> score of miles to Jerusalem each year.

>This is a "so what" passage. This is now and here. Everything else was
>then and there.

"Everything else" was much of the existance of humanity. "Now and here" is so
brief, so little.

>>> That the Jewish legends that later became the Old Testament were
>>> written from the beginning.

You omited some stuff here, without indicating thus: including what you were
responding to. Why?

>>> Sorry. Nope. That we don't have records back well before
>>> biblical writing. Do some
>reading.
>>
>> The copies of the Bible we have are the oldest extent manuscripts
>> in the world. We have medieval _copies_ of the classical works.

>The oldest manuscripts are Chinese. But why confine it to manuscripts.
>What about carved stone. Clay. Ropes tied into quipus.

I don't think you know less about Chinese history than even I do, or you would
have heard of Emperor Shihuangdi. (I don't think you know much about quipus.)

In fact, the parts taken out of my message were -- fancy that! -- about the
Bible in context to literature of Classical Greece and Rome. Although what I
say about trade being a great exception, rather than the rule, still holds.

>> Some of the Old Testament was legend. Some seems to be factual --
>> for example, the records of various kings of Israel.

>> In the same way, some of the writing about the Bible seems to be
>> factual, and some seems to be arbitrary assignment to one category
>> or another.

>>> Obviously you haven't read about Genghis Khan, the Roman empire,
>>> the Persian Empire, Alexander...

>> Those become history precisely _because_ they are exceptions to the
>> rule.

>They aren't exceptions, they're what was happening. They each caused
>millions of people to move and look at life differently.

Oh, come on! Most of people in the time of Alexander, or at any time before
him, _weren't_ soldiers. They were slaves, peasants, small farmers. _If_ they
lived in one of the cities conquered by Alexander, they might well have been
affected by the war. But the vast majority did not. The vast majority kept on
with life as it had been before whatever conquest occurred.

>> You have a story of Alexander kept by a town which did not change
>> for another fifteen hundred years. One town in a million is a
>> capital, that is, a town made by shifting armies. No, friend, I
>> learn history. But you forget that life goes on around and despite
>> history, that Alexander and Genghis Khan were not the rule.
>
>How silly a thing to say. They reshaped all the cultures they came in
>contact with.

That is, they changed _some_ of the literature and society of _some few_ of the
people. They affected a village in the path of the conquest, while the vast
number of others were unaffected.

YOu're trying to relegate the major threads of European
>history to some secondary position. They *are* human history. Along
>with all the other movers and shakers who have jostled us along our
>various cultural paths.

No. Before the printing press, most of human history is the life of these
small farms and villages. Once the printing press comes along, we can say that
the movers and shakers affect _us_. (Although there was still a long time
between act and effect: it took a good while before King George heard of what
some commoners did on July 4, 1776.) I can safely say that my ancestors were
not kings and queens, even when my people had "kings" of three and four
villages. I doubt, from my two left thumbs, that they were craftspeople of any
note. ;-)

>>> Any political entity has to have communications and means of
>>> moving people and goods or it isn't a political entity.
>>
>> Before the printing press, a town is a little entity in itself.
>> Farm fields surround it; water runs through it, with fish nets in
>> it. Each town fends for itself.
>Once in a rare while a very rich
>> person might have gold (imperishable) or a silk robe (kept
>> assiduously, and worn only for best occasions). Trade was the
>> exception, not the rule.

>There were *cities* back then.

Most people until very recently did not live in the few cities that existed.
They lived on farms, and, as I wrote, in rural villages.

>They depended on trade and traffic from
>afar to survive.

They ate from local orchards, local fields. Their meat came from the off-cast
calf, the hen run, or poached from a noble's preserve. In the winter, some
starved.

>Food, clothing, trade goods, luxuries, metals for
>their arms and utensils, skilled craftspeople, construction materials.

.. . . Came from wool or cotton, local crops. "Luxuries" were fruit or honey on
bread, olive oil -- again, local crops. They built with wood, stone,
wattle-and-daub, whatever was handy in the area.

>Trade and travel goes as far back as the stone age when flint nappers
>traded in spear and arrow points, knives, axes and other tools. There
>was trade between clans and tribes that far back.

But even then, I daresay, not common.

>>> Think tax collectors. In the ancient world, they moved from place
>>> to place to collect taxes.
>>
>> The Roman tax collectors either lived in Rome, or moved to the
>> province to live.

>And what then? They stayed in their houses and waited for money to
>come to them?

No, they shook down the _local_ people. They taxed the town they lived in.

> They moved from place to place. There were thousands and
>thousands of them. SAme with all imperial powers. People had jobs and
>were shifted around just like IBM and Exxon and Microsoft do it today.

The Imperial Tax Collector was a person of the region, and hated in that
region.

>>> Minstrels (by whatever name in the respective cultures) wandered
>>> and told and retold the stories of the culture.
>>
>> As before, this was rare.

>Sorry. No it wasn't. Musicians and players and storytellers and poets
>and dancers predate recorded history. When we talk of the Homeric
>tradition, it is exactly this. Wandering newscasters.

Yes, musicans and players and storytellers and poets were part of everyday
life. But, again, *wandering*, professional storytellers were rare. I sing as
I work in the field; or I am the storyteller for the village; or I turn
flute-player at the yearly fair. The fears of well-protected merchants are not
less than those of the poorer men and women.

>>> Armies moved. Merchants moved.
>>
>> Merchants moved with difficulty everywhere. Even along the Roman
>> roads -- and Rome was one empire, the exception testing the rule --

>This "rule" is yours. No one else talks in these terms.

I work from historians, and from primary sources. You?

>> there were thieves and wild animals. Along the seas there were
>> also waves testing your little ship. Merchants were quite rare.

>I don't know what your investment is in maintaining this posture, but
>the salient facts are in clear dispute with your ideas here. The
>Mediterranean was a major travel and trade route from before recorded
>history and it certainly didn't ever stop. Vast navies plied the seas
>and docked far from their home ports again and again.

The tideless Mediterranean was occasionally dared by people in tiny ships,
sailing in fear of sharks and pirates.

>Venice became fabulously wealthy because of trade. Spain. Portugal.
>Genoa. Trade means travel. Marco Polo and the guys traded.

Venice, Portugal, and Spain also gained from the printing press. Spain became
rich -- for a few hundred years -- because it used the press to create a new
image of Church and State. This work included throwing out "non-Spanish"
people.

Again, the Venetian Republic was a wonderful city built on a swamp -- a single
city. It was not a state.

>>> They may not
>>> have had written records that were mass produced, but they had
>>> storytellers who brought the old stories and the news with them.
>>> What do you think that scribes did? Large populations were
>>> constantly in motion.

>> The vast majority of people died where they lived. That was
>> ancient life.
>
>It depends on *whose* ancient life you're talking about.

Not Cleopatra's. But the farmers who fed her and the slaves who worked her
mines. The vast number of people who claim to be Cleopatra reincarnated must
not blind us to her uniqueness.

>The only people you've addressed in your notes have been Jews and
>Christians, and only a few of them, and only in a small part of the
>world. Then rest of the world far, far outnumbered these two groups
>and still does. But even so, imported goods from all over the Roman
>empire meant trade routes. Likewise every empire. Otherwise, there's
>no reason for them. They were specifically designed to move value
>(money in whatever form) to the centers. They gathered loot and they
>gathered trade goods.

Again, it's you who are ethnocentric. Money? The "economy" means the
management of the house. It's the same for a Kraal as for a ancient Chinese
farm village.

>You have a somewhat stunted view of those people, thinking them dim
>and inert.

Where does "trade" = "intellectual activity"? The fact that some of these
people *did* survive famine to generate us -- and occasionally produce works of
art, to boot -- shows that they had a very rich culture. Its oppressions and
liberations were under the town bunyan tree.

Not the case at all. And, most assuredly, not all villages.
>Baghdad was a city before the bible.

E. P.