Peterkin

There's still room in the world greener [non-chemically treated] grass The Hidden Life of Trees - Peter Wohlleben

Nor would that make the entire text a forgery. Somebody wrote the books. When? Over a period of time, possibly the whole 400 years between the death of some man, later identified as Jesus, who was executed, presumably for sedition, which would have been the most common charge, and the compilation of the final text. Somebody collected, selected and edited those books for inclusion in their official religious text. If they commissioned fake books, they were certainly in a position to hire skilled forgers, rather than clumsy ones. I would surmise that the obvious forgeries, therefore, predate the Council, and my guess as to their origin would be early Christians who couldn't write as well as the putative Luke and verified Paul, but wished to ride their authority. This, btw, is why so much apocrypha was excluded, because they were terrible writing. Other bits, perhaps because they were contemporary and not in accord with the compilers' intent. Careers can be made, also, on disproving the accepted version of things. Unfortunately, too many non-Christian historians are just as determined to see deceit and fakery as the christian ones are to deny it, they go to absurd lengths to attack even reasonable evidence for the other side's position.

Two I mentioned before: Konrad Lorenz - Behind the Mirror; The Foundations of Ethology. All of them, really - dated, but well ahead of the curve and quite readable. Erich Hoyt & E.O. Wilson - The Earth Dwellers - Adventures in the Land of Ants. A very favourite from long ago: Arthur Koestler - The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe Excellent story-telling. (Don't you wish all good books were written by nice people?)

Then why deny that the humans weaving that invention existed, lived, believed, preached and organized? Priests exist now - all kinds of clerics and prelates. They have existed for several thousand years. We didn't. We were fine with nature spirits, demons, totems and all sorts of local, familiar supernatural entities. Rulers need big, powerful gods. Mostly, he said "Stop fornicating and obey me." Psychological, mostly.: people are scared a lot of the time! And I think that's what scholars have done. Only: if one was a very bad forgery, wouldn't you expect the other also also to be bad? I mean, wouldn't you expect an inept forger to make all bad copies and a skillful one to make all good ones, rather than one of each?

Guy writes books, gets his face on ugly stained glass windows, I guess he exists, must have a name. Why not Luke? Why does he need justification? Somebody started the cult; somebody spread it; somebody established it. If you don't dispute the identity of Constantine, why worry about whether the others existed?

I don't understand slice and dice as applied to experience. The concept behind glass - if behind is the right word - is the brilliant idea of melting sand and reshaping it. Maybe 4000 years old, but now a wide-spread idea. People make glass the same ways in all countries. People use glass the same ways in all countries. People experience glass as drinking vessels, containers, corrective and magnifying lenses, light-porous window coverings, coffee table tops, picture protectors, church window decorations, trinkets and jewelry, paperweights and Christmas tree ornaments. In all countries. They talk about it in slightly different groupings or reference. Drinking, storing liquids, seeing, decorating.... Sure they do. They have words for all of those experiences. Everyone has words for them.

That's not a conceptual difference. That's a structural difference.

Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas was a favourite of my youth. Structures - or why things don't fall down by JE Gordon

The examples you gave were unconvincing: shadow and shade are of the same root, conceptually similar, with English having an extra little more nuance. Desk and table are the same species of furniture, where Russians probably add the specific function with an extra word, such as writing table, dining table, dressing table, cutting table (which is what desk apparently was in Latin) and you can say it that way in English, too. 'Blue' is an imprecise collective term for part of the spectrum which includes two dozen named shades. If Russian has two words, I would guess they refer to tints and tones - light and dark blues. But if the words refer to a colour range in that same portion of the spectrum, it's not a different concept - and I suspect they, too have more words to describe different shades and mixtures of blue. These are minor variations of vocabulary. They give the translator a moment's pause, but the concepts nevertheless correspond closely that an adequate translation is possible. That's where I would draw a conceptual line: not where you have a choice of words to say the same thing, but where you can't find any words to convey the meaning. An English speaker with a good vocabulary might very well differentiate tumbler from goblet from jigger, from spectacles and windowpanes; otherwise, you might say wineglass, water glass, juice glass, shot glass; eyeglasses; window glass; in common parlance, they're simply using the name of the material it's made from, and I'm sure there is Russian name for that, just as there is in Hungarian, which is 'uveg', but in polite company you drink from a 'pohar', because the thing "glass" is commonly used for is a bottle. You can differentiate drinking vessels in various ways, and differentiate the products made of glass, but the concept for both glass (the material) and drinking vessel is the same. I see variations in vocabulary: one tends to use a general term which needs to be refined if you want the specific item, while the other goes directly to the specific. If you can describe a thing when you don't know its name, the concept is the same. Again, with the manner and direction of motion, that seems to me a matter of emphasis, and number of words available for detailed description. English is a monster on vocabulary - it has gobbled up so many words from other languages that it can hone in on minute description with a single word where another language would have to use modifiers to achieve the same information-content. But again, I'm not seeing how moving upward quickly with the use of hands and feet is conceptually different in each language, just because one has shorthand for it and another doesn't. Can you describe how it would be different? My legs are tired. I need to sit down. Where is a furniture with a flat surface on which to place my bum?

I don't know so many languages and was not aware of this. Similarities, yes; not differences. Could you show some conceptual difference in the languages you know? For instance, how would this ^^ be different in Germanic language from a Romance one? And if the hub is a conceptual meeting-place for things that have a ?functional relationship to one another, how would it work for the experience of needing a chair to sit on in different languages? Would you, for example ask in a different way? Or would you actually think about the chair in a different way? I never really followed up the hub idea before, either. I was thinking in terms of specific-to-general categorization, with increasing degrees of abstraction. But I see that only as a chain or ladder, rather than a cluster. Can you elaborate?

Supposed to have several brothers? Why would this have been supposed by Paul, who didn't know Jesus? You're introduced to a guy, "This is James; he's Jesus' brother.' You just refer to him afterward by the relationship, not the birth-order, familal ratio or percent fraternity. (half brother, actually) People who wrote religious epistles two thousand years ago don't always adhere your to strict requirement of specificity and detail. Only what other people, including Paul, have written and the authorship of his gospel and The Acts of the Apostles. And this https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Luke

Unless a living leading apostle [Peter] was around to contradict him. Besides, where and when did Paul describe anybody or anything? "In the name of Christ the lord" and "It is written" and "God is faithful" "Stop being so naughty".... He uses the Name and the Word, not the persona or the story. He doesn't know the personality and doesn't care about the mortal man whose blessing he claims. But he does need to include in the idea of Christ the Lord who was raised from the dead (Remember, too, Jesus as equal to God won't be official canon for another 300 years after Paul's time.), all of the preachers who may have contributed to the various local Cristian cults. If you get too specific, you can alienate a congregation who have a recollection of a different prophet. (As I said earlier, the Jesus sightings reported in different places, after the crucifixion of one such preacher, strongly suggests that others had already taken up and carried the message to several provinces.) Paul was never interested in a historical Jesus, because at that time, the question didn't arise; historicity was not an issue; authority was. Also: as Luke is Paul's constant companion, and also an apostle in good standing, he already has a far better source of Jesus-lore.

Coulda sworn I just said that. However, the church rules don't necessarily flow, or even follow from the instigator of the legend. A great many - one might go so far as to say, most - Christians don't turn the other cheek, love their neighbour, give to the poor or forgive those who trespass against them, let alone imitate the lilies of the field. There is a real JK Rowling, or there would be no Harry Potter. After one meeting, in which he was rebuffed? The less said, the better. You keep wanting floods of detail about other people from a man who was utterly self-absorbed.

Sorry if i gave you a hard time. Ethology is sort of my pit-bull subject.

Wasn't that clear? I thought I explained it early on. There were any number of rebellious cells, small insurgencies and political foments during the Roman occupation. There were also religious reformers and self-proclaimed prophets aplenty, each with a loyal following. From time to time, when one of these insurgents got uppity, or collected too large a following, the Romans would crucify him or a whole group of them, for sedition. There was not one Yehoshua stand-in; there were a dozen or more. Hence: distillation. Of course. All legends contain some truth. There is zero doubt about crucifixion as a means of punishing disobedient subject peoples (rarely used on Roman citizens, but slaves like Spartacus got it) There is zero doubt about the political dissent, Judean nationalism or the existence of religious reform movements. There is zero doubt that somebody, somewhere came up with the kernel of Christian doctrine, because the cult was already established, its churches in several far-flung places were already established when Paul joined up as a self-proclaimed apostle. Christianity exists. It can be rejected, but it can't be denied.

I assumed that was implicit in "religious". Some gods, some demigods - but that's the embellishment part. The Jesus part is the leader, rebel, preacher, teacher, example-setter, trend-maker, martyr; the divine embellishments are the Christ part. Some forms of Jesus did exist; the myths were tacked onto his memory, only after he was killed, then raised to godhood by and authority that could impose its will on the religion of its times.

No. James Bond is as real as all the best secret agents in the field: he's a distillation of a many examples of a real thing, with wish-fulfillment embellishments added. Harry Potter is an adult's interpretation of a child's fantasy-life: his exploits are the embellishments on a distillation of smart, decent, competent boys. Jesus is a distillation of political activists in an age when religion was an identifying aspect of nationalism, with foreign religious embellishments added later. The starting point, or template, is one or more actual humans who lived and worked toward something and died.

Exactly my point. If the odd trait doesn't have a distinct advantage for the first very few possessors of it, how does it become the norm for an entire species? But as to the categorization thingie - I think it's the wrong way around. I think all sentient life-forms categorize, beginning with the paramecium differentiating inside from outside of it its membrane. You work up from there to more complex differentiations, and recognizable concept-chains according to the value system of the animal. Humans are able to verbalize their thinking process, because humans are predominantly visual perceivers and verbal communicators. They suck at high frequency sound and are hopeless on smell. The Atlantic article has a man - the one in the picture - at the center of it. He's a survivor. The second is a report on a scientific study of children who are not named.

I find speculation more interesting than hard science, precisely because it allows a wider-ranging discussion, and more facets to be examined. In this instance, I have one - and just the one - problem with the hypothesis. I can't envision the very specific mutation that enables this one sudden jump in brain function, nor the complex animal environment that didn't require conceptual chains of categories. I'm missing the uniqueness.

Agreed. Although an American and a Chinese baby could probably understand each other quite well through sound, and both mothers could understand the other's baby, once articulated language has been acquired, it's no longer interchangeable, but specialized by culture. The children of deaf-mute parents learn signing as a first language. Yes, like the Romanian orphans. (this one is a personal story, for interest.) Actually, there is more to abandonment in infancy than lack of language. The people who would lock an infant in an attic, are doing a lot more harm than just not talking to it. The emotional and social development, often also the physical development, is severely hampered. Neural connections that are supposed to form during the most intense growing phase of the brain lack the input they require. Much of that early growth, if missed, can never be compensated. I don't think it's possible to tell (without an unconscionably cruel experiment) whether a baby who had adequate stimulation and affection, medical attention and nourishment, who lacked only language, would have difficulty learning it later in life. Many of those severely neglected, deprived, malnourished and abused children have recovered physically, have gained linguistic and other forms of self-expression, but none seem fully to recover emotionally. Okay. Brain got bigger, more convoluted, more segmented, with more storage space for data and connections. That was never in doubt. What I question is whether the tree-structure of conceptual categorization is unique to humans, or just more readily expressed in human language. A horse-cart-horse situation, if you will.

best candidate: Luke - possibly the only person Paul really loved. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2008/dec/22/christianity-acts-apostles-luke He is consistently referred to as a physician, which means he studied somewhere, probably Antioch where he's supposedly from, which was cosmopolitan, with a strong Greek contingent. So was Tarsus a trade and naval center, with multi-ethnic population and variety of cultural influence. Very little is known about his personal life before the evangelical career, but there is no wide-spread doubt of the existence of either Paul or Luke - or, indeed, any of the apostles. Well, somebody real had to start this big, hungry religion!

I think his biggest problem was my father - a very demanding, impatient, punitive man, who issued a lot of ambiguous commands and administered arbitrary punishments. He confused and scared the hell out of his kids - never mind a sensitive dog who had been used to an indulgent family. Point still being, of course, that not only are dogs not limited to their native canine language, but that language is not static and fixed, but they can also learn one or more human languages, howbeit with a limited vocabulary (like news copy writers). Moreover, they can master quite abstruse communications, like "Here is a shirt to sniff. Go find its owner under all that rubble." and, not but

No, it's still the other way around. The Jesus cult must have been going strong enough for the Pharisees to be afraid of it That had to be set off by somebody - as each wave of heretical belief or rebellion always is. Remember, the Jews had a very stable, well established, strict national religion. They wouldn't just go off worshipping any old mythical figure without a compelling instigator to lead them. There was no shortage of candidates! It's that one charismatic instigator we associate with the legendary Jesus. Under Roman occupation, sometimes inept governors and an unpopular local government, there was always an element of incipient revolt, so the breakaway sects were closely watched and quickly suppressed. (In fact, the movie Life of Brian is not that far off the mark - barring the spaceship incident, of course). Open rebellion didn't actually break out until 66CE, by when Paul was dead. In his time, Jews were free to move about the empire and practice their religion, so there were many Jewish communities in Syria, Galatia, and Rome itself, all quite insular, with their own synagogues. Many of the 'mythical' aspects of the Jesus figure were undoubtedly added later, under the Roman church, as were the dates of his birth and death, to correspond with the pagan feasts of midwinter and spring. Bethlehem was important only to the Jewish followers who wanted their guy to be the promised "rod from the root of Jesse" who would lead the Jews out of Roman bondage, but the story resonated with the meek everywhere - and made Mary central, for those subjects who wanted their femle deities back, so it was kept in. As for the empty crypt - it just makes a ripping good tale. (It might originate in the practice of unceremonious mass burials, or leaving the corpses of political activists to rot on the crucifix as an example to unruly subjects. If they got permission, or could afford a bribe, the family would claim the body to bury according to their own customs.) Particularly telling is that he doesn't rise up at the crypt or anywhere near: the 'angel' says "seek him in Galilee" (huh?) and then: a whole bunch of sightings all over the place. Not unlike Elvis. What better reason to spirit away a messy, broken corpse than a desire to keep the legend alive? Nope. Paul wasn't a loving kind of guy; he was bossy kind of guy. The message had never stopped him persecuting christians before. I think he saw the cracks in the colonial system; knew trouble was coming and Pharisee rule ending. I think he caught the most promising religious train out of Judea. (But the afterlife belief, which the Pharisees also held strongly, he did share with the christians already. That might be the key.) Except, he went to see Peter and James in Jerusalem, where they were nobodies. That was much later, in Rome that Peter became leader of the sect. Paul was never 'part of' Peter's ministry in Rome. He only got there in 58CE, spent two years in jail, got out, left Rome, came back in time to be martyred in one of Nero's purges, in 64CE . He doesn't have to. No legend had to exist in real life. If you just like the story and the message, that's fine; nobody will give you an argument. But if you claim something as literal truth, with the power to drive civil legislation, you'd better be able to back it up, or face a lot of opposition.

Why would he have started preaching about a mythical figure? Where did he get the mythical figure? Why would have started preaching at all? The Jesus cult was already going strong - though it wasn't very big, the believers were zealous - and a threat to the establishment. At one pivotal moment, he converted. Why? We can't know. My guess is, he suddenly realized that they were his ticket to the future - not the future of the Jews, who were very small potatoes, but the Roman Empire, which was a very big, very warm potato. He knew that somebody who started all that fuss had existed until a very few years before, because he deliberately went to Jerusalem to talk to the guy's brother and best friend. Interesting. What purpose does it then serve to talk to Peter, who also attested to the reality of the man he followed? Lots of people knew Peter. While Paul might have fudged the relationship of James to his fabled half-brother, he couldn't very well lie to the Christian churches about Peter while Peter was Bishop of Rome. Is there a flood - or even a tickle - of detail about anybody? It's all I-me-myself and you-ought-to's. Like I said, the Jesus - whatever the real name of the most recent cult-starting minor prophet was - was a vehicle for him to make the religion he wanted to lead. He wasn't interested in the dead guy; he was interested in the franchise. Most of the mythical stuff was brought in later, by other drivers of the same bandwagon. Roman scribes had access to the religious traditions of two dozen conquered nations, and most of them had some kind of spring rebirth myth with godling at the center of it; all of them had some forms of blood sacrifice... It's not that big a stretch to cast the obscure, yet oddly popular little Jewish prophet in the role of resurrected sacrificial demigod.