Does anyone involved in this current discussion consider the Bible to be history?
I find it interesting that religious writings are considered history because they contain historical references. But they were written for an entirely different purpose. As a case in point there are four known earliest more or less complete manuscripts of the Christian Bible. Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, both mid 4th century; Codex Alexandrinus (late 4th century, and Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus (early 5th century). The ending of Mark 16:9-20 does not exist in the two earliest manuscripts, and early Church fathers do not mention them. Mark 16:9-20 does appear in the two later codicies. But there are three different versions of thisadded ending in other manuscripts. One is shorter than the now accepted ending, one is the currently accepted ending, and one is a more extended version of the currently accepted ending. Note that not only does Mark in its earliest known version not have the resurrection, it also does not have Jesus' miraculous birth either. So Mark ends like this: 'Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.' The short version added in later on is: 'Then they quickly reported all these instructions to those around Peter. After this, Jesus himself also sent out through them from east to west the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation. Amen.' This kind of textual corruption also is found in, for example, the Lord's Prayer where 'For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.' which does not appear in any of these early manuscripts shows up a couple of centuries later. There is also the synoptic problem. Historians and Biblical scholars seem mostly in agreement that Mark is the earliest of the Gospels (though some of the letters of Paul are earlier). That sections of Mark are copied verbatim or almost verbatim in Matthew and Luke means these are not independent accounts. There is also another source for Matthew and Luke called 'Q' which contains the sayings of Jesus, and Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1 (early half of the 3rd century) and the Gospel of Thomas also contain sayings of Jesus. The date of the Gospel of Thomas is in dispute, one group of scholars argue for somewhere between 50 and 100 CE and others for some time in the 2nd century. These writings are more Gnostic in inclination, but also seem to have an slant that is more in line with what Maharishi teaches. If you look at the way the TM movement revises and changes texts today, you can imagine that in that period of early Christianity, about which most information is really lost, how different segments of the growing community of Christians would copy, preserve and sometimes enhance what came before them. There are glaring contradictions between different versions of the tale, which indicates we do not have the original story. Religions tend to be based on faith (which is pretending to know things that one does not actually know, in other words, belief without any factual evidence) and have a message that spreads those empirically deficient thoughts to others. It is even possible that Jesus never existed as an historical person, though a very definite personality seems to come through the fog of history. There are no contemporary references to him, except for a short passage in the history of Flavius Josephus which is universally regarded as an interpolation by scholars (and even the Catholic Church) due to its being unconnected to the material that surrounds it, and in a different style. There is no evidence of just about everyone who lived in the first century Some of the letters of Paul (about half of them), considered the earliest Christian writings, interestingly speaks of Jesus, of Christ, as a spiritual force rather than as a person, that is, as something that could be experienced rather than merely believed, but this is looking at his writings from a more gnostic point of view, the gnostic viewpoint being the main competition to what now survives as Christianity. The other half of the letters of Paul are in dispute that he was the author. The authors of the Gospels are also unknown, but attributions of course are now tightly affixed to each one.
