I am expecting this year to enter a master’s program researching the historical origins of our canonical Christian literature. The thesis I have discussed with a potential supervisor is the evidence for their composition as late as the mid to late second century. So it was with mixed feelings that I read Robert Vipper’s 1946 Russian study that in many ways coincided with the very thesis that I had been developing in recent years.
I was first very pleased with his explanation of his approach to historical sources. Yes, he applies the same methods that historians in non-biblical or non-theological studies take for granted. He sees right through the circularity of most biblical scholars taking the narratives of the gospels and epistles at face value (or at least that they are attempts, however mythologized, to rely on some historical core), without any independent controls to test their character as source material. That’s been a “hobby horse” of mine for some years now. I am in step with his method of testing and evaluating the sources. (I pull back a little, however, on his positivist view of historical analysis — that is, Marxist-Hegelian interpretation of “laws” of historical development. Though I was intrigued by his conclusion that Christianity as we would recognize it began more as a movement led by the reasonably well-to-do members of society. All of that is another discussion for another day.)
I said I had mixed feelings. One of them was feeling humbled in having to acknowledge that others (or at least Vipper) have long ago paved the main path I have been traveling on. But that is also reassuring. Vipper identifies the horrific calamities inflicted on the Judeans not only in the war of 66-70 but even moreso with the massacres under Trajan and Hadrian as being critical factors in the emergence of what we think of as conventional Christian literature. Where he has gone on well ahead of what I had been thinking, though, is that he finds as much explanatory power in the post-Hadrianic period: that is, the “enlightened” flavour of the times under Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. He even points to Plutarch’s “parallel lives” (published much earlier) as having a significant influence on the gospels. That’s an idea I attempted to explore a long time ago and Vipper tempts me to revisit that possibility.
Other encouraging points in common:
- The original view of a suffering and crucified messiah was not that it took place in heaven but that it was originally an abstract or mystical act beyond space and time. In the second century we see various efforts to transfer this idea into a real place and setting in history.
- Justin Martyr (mid second century) does not know the canonical gospels
- The Epistle of Barnabas is a “pre-gospel” text
Other hypotheses that surprised me:
- The Shepherd of Hermas and The Didache are pre-Christian writings (or at best “proto-Christian”)
- Jesus was a minor deity among Jewish associations prior to Christianity. Here Vipper points to some of the stronger arguments of W.B. Smith.
All of the above is found in
- Vipper, Robert Iu. Vozniknovenie khristianskoi literatury
(Возникновение христианской литературы)
[The Emergence of Christian Literature]. Moscow: Nauka, 1946.
The other work I have translated
Vipper, Robert Iu. Rim i rannee khristianstvo
(Рим и раннее христианство)
[Rome and Early Christianity]. Moscow: Izdatelʹstvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1954.
Here Vipper explores in more detail the historical background from which Christianity emerged in the later second century. Given recent discussion here on the letter of Pliny the Younger to Trajan about Christians, some readers will find Vipper’s chapter on that letter of interest.
Both translations are accessible via a new page I have created. Robert VIPPER (Wipper) – Works Translated into English Check the right margin of this blog.
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Wow. So your premise is an obscure communists developed an obscure theory “proving” Christianity was just a fable. Oh no Christians what will we do? The cats out of the bag, billions of people have been duped.
You should learn what this blog is about:
Not here to debunk Christianity
Vridar is not an anti-Christian blog
Clearly the exercise of disinterested historical research is beyond your comprehension.
I also find your reference to “obscure communist” of interest. Do you mean by “communist” a Russian professor of the 40s and 50s? Do you mean by “obscure” someone whose work is not well known in the West? Are you suggesting we should assume the scholarship of such a figure must be fraudulent and that a serious researcher should not bother even reading it?
Ever wonder about the power of Western propaganda?
(1) Robert Vipper was one of the most important Russian historians of the 20th century. He was not obscure at all.
(2) Vipper was not really a huge Communist and for most of his career did not actually work within Marxist frameworks until basically the very end (basically the last ten or so years of his life).
(3) No one here cares to debunk Christianity. The world doesn’t revolve around you. Go touch grass.
Dare I resurrect the name of a widely popular-on-social-media biblical professor who once reacted with despair that I had dared mention a leading British historian, Eric Hobsbawm, when discussing historical research methods, contrasting them with some of the worst nonsense found among biblical scholars? Shock, dismay — Hobsbawm was “left wing” — an American might even see him as a “Communist”, and as a Communist he was, of course, part of wider plot to undermine all that was good and decent about American democracy, capitalism, puritanism, inequality, gun culture, world-rule!
Oh I’m so interested in who had a problem with Hobshawm.
(I mean I do, but not for the reasons they do lol)
Tim here used to refer to his old blog as “Exploding Cake Mix”. After his first expression of utter dismay that anyone would refer to a “communist sympathizer” historian, and warning that such a historian clearly was part of an agenda to undermine all that was good about America and Christian biblical studies or something very much like that, he did eventually come to learn that Hobsbawm was indeed a well-known and highly reputable historian. He then changed tack and tried to claim through extensive word massage and convoluted contortions that Hobsbawm supported the way biblical scholars worked! The only thing that changed between his two opinions was that he learned that Hobsbawm had a serious reputation that he would be a fool to ignore.
What is most daunting about studying Christian origins in the 2nd century is the enormous scope of the task.
If we come to a conclusion that our oldest texts are early 2nd century (which seems more likely than ever) then we have at the very beginning a snapshot of Christianity that is multifaceted and divided and possible regionally diverse.
It goes against our initial assumptions because we assume it must have started as a small cult with unitary beliefs which divided out. This initial assumption I now presume is wrong, and we need a new model of how so many Christian groups suddenly come into existence all at once. I presume that much of the Christian IP existed in a Jewish Diaspora spread across the Mediterranean and that 3rd Jewish war precipitated a great division that forced members of these Diaspora and associated converts to choose a side. Christianity then defines itself as those who reject Judaism.
Could there also have been a Jewish movement at the same time that was trying to ‘purify’ the Jewish faith, trying to remove ‘heretical’ belief systems? It would explain why the Christians wrote stories about being persecuted by Judaism – perhaps it was an allegorical depiction of the division they were living through then?
Any time I think I have come up with a reasonable model for explaining the origins of Christianity in all its diversity, I always find I am left with all these loose ends that don’t necessarily fit.
The Christ story that is now so central to Christianity seems to have multiple origins weaved together.
I think the most obvious origin is the Isaiah ‘Suffering Servant’ which I also think leads on to the Ascension of Isaiah gospel. I have a small pet theory that the name Isaiah is linked to Jesus, there does seem to be some etymology connection, but I am not sure if there is any solid research I can use. In my pet theory, I suspect the Christ spirit descends into the body of Isaiah when he is sawed in half and the spirit of Isaiah sees this from above, and notes
“In Jerusalem indeed I was Him being crucified on a tree”
Of course, this Isaiah == Jesus phase may have been short-lived as the Ascension of Isaiah later interpolations seem to have obfuscated this out very quickly.
The Sethians obviously had a completely different origin story about Jesus, then we have the Logos and then the other loose end that refuse to cooperate: The Yeshu/Yeshuva folk legends. If we still think Q material is a separate source, then we also have the ‘Son of Man’ sayings.
Out of all this diversity we often think the early Christians were ridiculously divided, but maybe we should be marveling at how they did manage to find common ground. We perhaps get bogged down in the heresiology, but I wonder if the real story of 2nd century Christianity is how they did manage to accommodate each other’s belief systems and actually produce works that mostly unified the movement.
It will be interesting to see how you choose which rabbit holes to follow. I think the broadest approach possible is best, but it just might be too much to chew.
You are quite right about Christian origins being such a vast topic — hence my first plan is to limit myself to the first appearance of Christian literature in the historical record. Vipper and W.B. Smith both argue that the Book of Acts has left numerous clues about the multi-nodal origins of Christianity behind its attempt to portray it all beginning from Jerusalem and spreading out from there. I am getting lazy and instead of outlining the evidence in Acts myself I hope to post some links to it before too long — one of them probably being another translation, this one from the German.
Thanks for this text. Your discovery of it, and making a translation of it free to download is much appreciated.
I’m glad you find it of interest.
Neil, I was reading your earlier posts on Dykstra and Brodie, et al, and I also recently read in a book by Rafael Rodriguez that “we do not have one single syllable of early Christian oral tradition.” (This in a book about oral tradition!). The orthodoxy is of course that Christian literature is preceded by an oral tradition on which the lit is based, but this is an assumption, it seems. This makes me wonder about the recent theory that has been popping up (Livesey, etc) that Paul is a fictional character. Do you think it possible that Paul might have been invented (perhaps by Marcion or Cerdo?) in order to bridge the gap between 2d C. (or late 1st C.) gospels and the Tiberian time frame of the mythical events? Is it possible the 1st C. churches did not exist, or not quite as imagined in the Pauline letters? Or is that too speculative? If Paul is a late invention, seems like he could have been imagined as knowing more about the “events”. What do you think?
That any kind of oral tradition lies behind the gospel narratives is an assumption arising out of another assumption — that the gospels are pious efforts to write about a historical person and historical events that spawned their faith. If the Christian narrative is historically grounded — and by definition Christianity as we recognize it is historically grounded in the narrated events of the gospels — and if, as is clearly evident, the gospel authors were not eyewitnesses to those events, then one is led to appeal to “oral tradition” as the link between those events and the written gospels.
The claim that the gospels are based at some level on historical events is circular. The circularity of the reasoning is set out at https://vridar.info/bibarch/arch/davies2.htm
(I am writing this for a wider audience, Clarke. Hence I am returning to some basics.)
In other words, remove the circularity of the claim that the gospel narratives are historically grounded at some level, and we have no reason, no justification, to introduced “Oral Tradition” at all.
(Brodie and others have demonstrated that some of the justifications for oral trad are invalid.)
As for Paul . . . .
Vipper acknowledges that we have no way of knowing “where Paul came from” and is prepared to accept the possibility that there was a wandering preacher named Paul around Asia Minor whom Marcion once knew.
Some have objected to Livesey’s theory on the grounds that Paul must have been a reputable figure in order for the writings of Paul and Acts to be welcomed so widely when they were. The flaw in that objection, I think at this point, is that popular figures necessarily have “beginnings” in the public arena, and to ask what came before the epistles or Acts is like asking “but what came before God– where did God come from?” It is so much easier just to assume that the letters and Acts both have some genuine autobiographical and historical basis. Assumptions all the way down. (We don’t have to make such assumptions re the writings of Julius Caesar, Cicero, Seneca, Pliny the Younger…..)
I think Livesey also slips slightly into this same trap when she argues that Paul’s letters would have been accepted as genuine IF Paul was already an established figure — HENCE her proposal that Acts preceded the letters. (– if I recall her argument correctly)
But why could not Paul have been introduced by Marcion? Why could not the letters have been produced not to introduce Paul but to support the presentation of Marcion and Paul that was being popularized? I don’t ask those as defensive rhetorical questions. I really am open to rebuttals. I could turn the questions around into propositions.
As for the first century churches . . . .
Vipper sees these as Jewish associations akin to Greek associations — all having their patron hero-deity: Orpheus, Dionysus, Jesus, etc. Maybe. I need to learn more before commenting. But I think he is drawing at least in part on W.B. Smith’s view here. (I’ll be posting my translation of the relevant article soon-ish.) At Vipper’s prompting I read the relevant article by Smith and was very intrigued by Smith’s analysis of Acts and the clues it leaves for the existence of scattered churches with a “pre-Christian Christianity”. (I’ll be posting something about this soon.)
As for these associations/churches existing as early as the first century, Vipper argues that both Hermas and Didache are “pre-Christian” documents and that they reflect a time of relative peace — unlike the “apocalyptic” scenarios of the late first to mid second centuries for the Judeans.
Thanks for the opportunity to try to set out some of what I’ve been thinking lately. I may have missed some of your initial query in the process, though.
Just by way of a general comment — I referred above to the view that the gospel narratives originated to some extent in historical events as an unsupported assumption. Part of what lies behind my thinking here is the simple fact that the gospels nowhere give any explicit information or clear indication about their sources or how their anonymous authors came by any of the details — yet we have ample evidence that much of their narrative is taken from other literary sources, Greek and Judean. The positive evidence points to literary sources reconfigured to produce a new literary creation; the “negative evidence” advises us that there is nothing to be found by seeking historical origins, and hence oral tradition of any kind.
There is no “history” behind the Gospel stories. None of the so-called “events” of the various Jesus Stories EVER happened “in history”. The Gospels are early examples of ‘Midrash” [Commentary & interpretation “in story form”] on “the Scriptures” [the Old Testament] (which is also mostly “in story form”). Jesus and his disciples are LITERARY CHARACTERS and “the plot” happened, as Paul says, “according to the Scriptures’.
Agreed. But what we are looking at here is those stories being manufactured from as late as the mid to latter second century, and the reasons for them being manufactured.
Regarding “the reasons for them being manufactured”:
I’ll mount my hobby horse and propose a reason why one group might want to manufacture them. According to the early heresy hunters, the Simonians loved to take texts and give them an interpretation that related them in some way to their own Simonian ideas. They did this with texts respected by their pagan neighbors (e.g. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey) and with texts respected by the Jews (the Old Testament writings). But what do you do if you want to inject Simonian ideas into the 1st century religious/nationalistic ferment that occurred in Israel and you don’t have a Scripture-like text covering the period? Answer: You make one. You personify the Israel of that time in a central character put together from bits and pieces taken from any of the people and events of that time and place. And the advantage of creating such a text is that you can embed enigmas in it from the start that you intend to later take in Simonian directions.
I still think that the best candidate for creating such a text (proto-Mark) was Basilides, known to be a prolific writer but most of whose writings are lost. And the best candidate for expanding it into Marcion’s Gospel was Cerdo of Antioch. Cerdo too would be the one who greatly inflated Paul’s meager letters by using material from the communities of Saturnilus of Antioch. In my opinion the unevenness of the Paulines cannot be explained just by proto-orthodox interpolations. The zigs, zags and zugs are due, I think, to being put together from skeletal letters of Paul (a Jew), a lot of practical and mystical material from communities of Saturnilus (a disillusioned former Jew), and finally some touch-ups by the Proto-Orthodox (originally Gentile Godfearers). GMatthew I would peg as a Proto-Orthodox reaction as well as canonical Mark and Luke.
I don’t mean to sidetrack this post. And thank you, Neil, for the translations of Vipper. But I just get the urge now and then to ride my hobby horse.
I don’t have the background to engage with the specific possible authors as you do, but yes, I think you are right, certainly in principle even apart from a Simonian gospel — not that I reject that possibility- just attempting to cover all bases. I think that’s what Bruno Bauer was saying all those years ago — that is, Jesus was created as a personification of the Church and his experiences were those of the church (and Clarke Owens infers the same with his crucifixion explanation).
I was somewhat in overdrive with my previous comment. What’s complicating the picture for me is still the question of where the Jesus figure originated — that he was narrated as a personification of the church or old/new Israel or such is a different question, of course. Why was the personification, if that’s what it was, applied to this Jesus figure? I’ve read some arguments for a pre-Christian Jesus but I am not sure they are all as watertight as I would like.
Neil, I’m not sure I understand you when you ask, “Why was the personification, if that’s what it was, applied to this Jesus figure?” Because what I am proposing is that there was no one Jewish Jesus figure behind the gospel Jesus. I am thinking the gospel Jesus was put together in the 2nd century with pieces taken from any number of 1st century figures and sources, (e,g, Theudas, the Egyptian, Judas the Galilean, Jesus son of Ananias, Josephus, Old Testament, etc.) and that the guiding principle behind the Simonian author’s choice of elements was: Use whatever can lend itself to interpretation in a Simonian sense.
In other words, the gospel Jesus was created by Simonians as a personification of 1st century Judaism to use it for Simonian purposes. Simonians had interpreted Homer’s writings in a Simonian sense, and the same for the Old Testament writings, and now they created a Scripture-like text to interpret 1st century Judaism in a similar way.
I am aware this sounds like some kind of conspiracy theory, but gMark contains indications that point in that direction. It was intended that “those on the outside” (Mk 4:11) would not understand it. For outsiders “all things are done in parables” (Mk 4:11) including, I think, the gospel Jesus himself. But those on the inside would be given the key “in private” (Mk 4:34). And this secrecy meshes nicely if Basilides was the author of proto-Mark. His followers said, “Not many can know these things, but one in a thousand”, and claimed that “they were no longer Jews, but not yet Christians, and their secrets must not be uttered.”
If this is how the gospel Jesus originated, it was just a fluke of history that this Simonian creation was believable enough to eventually take on a life of its own.
Neil, i recommend this fresh russian book about Didache too https://4etalka.ru/nauka_obrazovanie/istoriya/583514/fulltext.htm
Can you give me a reason for your recommendation? A perusal of the page you link to (translated) indicates to me that the book is an apologist case for the Didache being the earliest document of the original teachings of Jesus and his followers — prior to the writings of Paul, the gospels and Acts.
how i found, it’s the newest and very detalized study of the Didache
Another thought about Paul that I had been entertaining before I read Vipper — this one prompted by something Enrico Norelli wrote:
— Norelli, Enrico. 2017. La nascita del cristianesimo. Il Mulino.
Paul constructs his life [or rather an author constructed Paul’s life] around the history of Israel with Christ crucified as its turning point. Paul the “legalist” (I use the term very loosely aware of the differences of pre-rabbinic Judaism) then we have the “church” Paul, the Paul who was “all things to all men” for whom the law is abolished on the cross. — I was comparing Jesus: also a personification of Israel, as most distinctly presented in the opening scenes in the Gospel of Mark (baptism/exodus — elect by god — 40 days/years wilderness…. then the crucifixion prior to the new spiritual figure).
I was seeing both figures emerging as personifications that constructed a new idea of “a people of God” out of the horrors of the Nero/Vespasian/Titus-Trajan-Hadrian wars. Vipper has opened up another possibility for me to consider with his focus on the intellectual and social cultures that followed Hadrian and as led by Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius.
Of course you were the one who first led me to think of Jesus as a personification of the “new Israel” (or “people of God”) with your book on the meaning of the crucifixion in the context of the (first) Jewish war.
“we do not have one single syllable of early Christian oral tradition.”
I’m confused as to what this means. Of course it’s highly unlikely that oral tradition per se would survive 2000 years. It only survives by being written down somewhere, at which point it’s no longer “oral tradition”. So the statement above is close to a tautology, which is nearly vacuous historically.
I hasten to add that I lean toward Jesus mythicism, but these matters are not as simple as either Neil, on the one hand, or e.g. James McGrath, on the other, like to think. Even mythicists recognize that some kinds of oral tradition probably contributed to the gospels, in the form of beliefs about a Jesus in the heavenly realm.
The tautology is evident — with Clarke pointing out the irony that it was written in a book about oral tradition (Rodriguez, Rafael. 2014. Oral Tradition and the New Testament: A Guide for the Perplexed. T&T Clark.).
I think we have a different understanding of what we mean by “oral tradition”, however. The word “tradition” implies tradents, people passing on from one to another a traditional saying that had an origin among people who believed they heard it from people alive at the time of the events.
Ideas otherwise are mostly shared orally without being expressions of “tradition”. I have no doubt that the authors of the gospels developed ideas partly through oral exchanges with others who were passing on ideas from other readings and other teachers. If some were suggesting Jesus came from a heavenly realm they are not passing on “oral tradition” in the sense it is normally understood among “biblical historians”. They are passing on, orally, beliefs, but not “traditions”.
As for “simplicity”, my point is that we have no evidence for oral tradition behind the gospels but we have ample evidence of literary creativity and development.
If others think there was probably some kind of oral tradition contributing to the gospels they are merely speculating in the absence of any supporting evidence. The reason such speculations are acceptable is because they have become so commonplace in the field of biblical studies. I do not see this kind of baselessness being accepted as “probable fact” in any other non-bibical historical inquiry in our Western oriented universities, etc.
For what it’s worth, allow me to try to make a certain point again, if you will…..
My interest and argument is not whether Jesus was mythical as opposed to historical. That’s why in the last good many years I have declined to call myself a “mythicist”. Do we call biblical scholars and theologians who view the Jesus of the gospels as a theological construct, as a figure far removed from historical reality, “mythicists”? Yet we certainly could because many of them say that the Jesus of the gospels did not exist. Quite right.
My position is the same as theirs in that respect — I also say the Jesus of the gospels did not exist.
The difference between us is that many (but NOT ALL) of them, insist that there was ALSO a historical Jesus “behind” the gospels. I do not believe we can see “behind” texts but are limited only to interpreting what is “in” texts. What we find in the texts is evidence that the Jesus of the gospels is created from other literary and theological ideas.
The question of mythicism or historicism of Jesus is simply bypassed and is inconsequential to me. What interests me is why these gospel and epistolary texts were written, what we can glean about the origins of Christianity from them. — Using the methods of independent control that are taken for granted among most (non-biblical) historians.
The entire notion of oral tradition is grounded in the tradition millennia old that the Christian faith is a historical faith and therefore it inevitably follows that oral tradition must have existed between a historical Jesus and the literature about Jesus (although that literature does not depict a “historical” Jesus!!!)
“The word “tradition” implies tradents…”
I would have thought only the converse was true – tradents imply tradition. I can imagine the latter without the former, if Wiktionary is correct here:
Noun
tradent (plural tradents)
A person who is responsible for preserving and handing down traditions, especially oral traditions, generally used in the context of the Bible and rabbinic Jewish traditions.
Traditions can be passed down without anyone in particular being charged with doing so.
But your expertise is much greater than mine in these areas. Can you give me a link to scholarly definitions of these terms? I assume all of this falls under the general heading of “folklore”?
Hi Andrew — you’re keeping me on my toes, and that’s good. Vansiaa’s classic volume (Oral Tradition as History) does not mention tradents at all, and as the dictionary note you cited says, the word is particularly common in biblical studies. Richard Bauckham in his Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (pages refer to 1st edition) refers to tradents throughout and it is always to depict them as persons a community or the Twelve recognize as authorities who can be trusted to pass on what they have seen or heard from eyetwitnesses:
Eric Eve in Behind the Gospels, chapter 6:
Dunn in Eyewitnesses and the Oral Jesus Tradition:
Hengel in Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ speaks of “the authority of tradents” 292,
Kee in Removing Anti-Judaism from the New Testament —
(Other texts — e.g. Parker’s An Introduction to the New Testament Manuscripts and Their Texts — speak of tradents as written documents, manuscripts, the work of scribes. But that’s not the sense we — or the above texts — are using the word.)
Soviet thinkers were wildly ahead of their time. Amazing what a commitment to scientific atheism, methodological naturalism, and Marxist analysis will do for ya.
Except for Lysenko, who was even worse than RFK jr is today, for the health of the Soviet citizenry.
Neil, I think I already know the answer to this, but I have to ask: is there really no other way of translating written resources (that admittedly may not be easily accessible) except by using AI? You do, after all, recognize one of the MANY problems of using AI in research.
Glad you asked. I always post the original text beside or along with my translation because I want anyone using the translation to be able to cross check for fidelity. I have done the same with the Vipper books.
In one of my first AI translations — Bruno Bauer — I even posted the translation in parallel with the German so readers can check instantly the English against the German.
My method of translation:
I try to get a decent OCR rendering of the text first, including Fraktur, with tools I own. Several online tools I have experimented with simply don’t do the task adequately.
But then I enter a selected section at a time for translation. I do not toss in whole book files. I have also learned that tossing in a whole article rarely yields satisfactory results. I enter the text section by section, copy and paste. Sometimes that will be a few lines, a paragraph, or more usually a page or a small handful of pages at a time. I then copy the translated text into a document and compare it against the original. As a check for the fidelity of the translation I look for the matching of footnote numbers, paragraph breaks, length of paragraphs, and page breaks. I generally (but not always) preserve the paragraph breaks but I am meticulous in preserving the page breaks. That way I can at a glance see if the translated text has not been generated by an AI with a mind of its own that truncates or creatively expands its translation.
The languages I have used up till now are also easy to match as a rule against English because one soon learns to see words with common roots. (The Vipper project showed me that is even true with the Cryllic text.) Not just recognizing words, but especially seeing their spacing and larger structural relation to other passages on the page or paragrah. That also helps me check the fidelity of the translation.
But I do not recommend this approach to be copied blindly by anyone. AI sometimes has a mind of its own, as you know. I have over years struggled to “tame” the various AI tools I have used. But when it does something like that the result can be quickly noticed — the translation is oddly shorter or longer than the original passage. That calls for a re-look and a rephrasing of the prompt I have been using.
One thing I have come to hate is when an AI took actually thanks me for noticing its errors and acknowledging that it had not followed my instructions here and there.
But at the end of the day I am aware that there may be errors I have missed and so I post a warning to readers to that effect and I always post a link to (if not always a copy of the original text) the electronic copy of the work I have translated. By preserving the page numbers I trust this will not be too onerous a task.
There are other little tricks and checks I have learned over the years, but here you have the general idea of my approach.
Here is one of the prompts I am currently using. You can see the sorts of creativity in AI translation that I am battling against. Unfortunately this particular prompt results in a quite wooden translation that is not the easiest to read, but for the work I am using it of I would rather have a dry and wooden text than one more likely prone to error:
I appreciate you explaining your process, (access to primary sources is key), but my original comment expressed more of a concern for the detrimental environmental effects of AI. (i.e. GenAI, ChatGPT, etc. I’ve heard quite horrifying things about them…) That’s really what worries me.
What, specifically, worries you that my attempts at some control for veracity do not cover? I know AI has many potential flaws, but it is also a fabulous tool. I have found it to be an incredible time-saver in research. I’m not saying I believe everything it offers, but behind the surface text it produced, it does provide pointers to things to check out that often turn out to be useful. I saw Richard Carrier making some critical remarks about AI but I didn’t read all that he wrote since much of what I did read indicated to me he had failed to understand AI’s potential and how to critically use it.
It’s like any tool — useful if used correctly. That means having some basic idea of how it works and what to look out for in its results. I tend to use more than one AI program to compare and check results.
Some critics remind me of the ancient myth where someone protested the invention of writing: “But that will mean we won’t have to remember anything anymore — it will be the ruin of humanity!”
Social and political issues are another very serious concern — I don’t deny those. But it is a fantastic tool in many ways. Fantastic servant, but a horrid master. And just remember servants are also “human” and their work needs to be supervised.
I’ll make two points concerning the deleterious effects that AI has on the environment.
First off: AI is a water-guzzler.
“The study reports that Microsoft used approximately 700,000 litres of freshwater during GPT-3’s training in its data centres […]”. (Sophie McLean, 28/4/23, earth.org.)
“Research suggests, for instance, that about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3 at Microsoft’s data facilities. […]” (Mariana Mazzucato, 30/5/24, The Guardian.)
“Third, data centres use water during construction and, once operational, to cool electrical components. Globally, AI-related infrastructure may soon consume six times more water than Denmark, a country of 6 million, according to one estimate. […]” (UN Environment Programme, 13/11/25.)
Secondly: AI is run largely by the fossil fuel industry, and furthermore, consumes a vast amount of energy.
“A request made through ChatGPT, an AI-based virtual assistant, consumes 10 times the electricity of a Google Search, reported the International Energy Agency. […]” (UNP, ibid.)
“A single response from ChatGPT emits 4.41 grams of carbon dioxide, while a Google search emits an estimated 0.2 grams. […]” (Riley G. & Isolina C., The Piper, Campbell Hall, 13/2/25.)
“One estimate says ChatGPT might release over 260,000 kilograms of CO₂ each month. That’s like the emissions from 260 round-trip flights between New York and London. This amount would increase even more if users shift to longer or more complex prompts, which require more processing time and energy. […] (Jennifer L, Carbon Credits, 6/8/25.)
That’s some of the horrifying things I’ve heard about AI.
Ah — I have been talking way past you, sorry. I thought you were pointing to concerns about the reliability of AI.
Yes indeed, and there is a very real prospect that our civilizations will be collapsed by climate changes in the near future. Our existence in nations that are the advanced beneficiaries of technologies that are bringing us towards this collapse is itself problematic. But just being part of society makes ethical culpability is inevitable. Simply being a functional citizen of Australia makes me complicit in the massacres our government has facilitated. (I am helping fund all of that, and I voted for some representatives who are allowing it all to happen.) I have inherited the fruits of genocide just by being born here. I could opt out totally but then my survival will become a pressing concern.
I do have misgivings about a collapsed civilization with pockets of descendants of today’s all-powerful Elon Musks and co ruling sectors like warlords sheltered in and with the support of their technologies that were responsible for the disaster — but to sustain them in that world (if possible at all) would require even more extreme and direct tyranny.
As Chomsky said, we have no choice but to be optimistic and work for better alternatives, including obviously in development of alternative energy sources — the alternative to optimism is to roll over and die.
Just for the record, I initially thought you were concerned (understandably) about the quality of the translation done principally by AI. Hence my first reply.
Maybe if you tell me some of those “quite horrifying things” that concern you. . . .
(re my earlier remark about Richard Carrier, I would have preferred him to have explained to his readers how to use it to their maximum benefit, what to watch out for, without tossing out the baby with the bathwater)
This is from someone I used to defend on the earlywritings forum against bullies — https://earlywritings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14809 — and I’d give him recognition for his intelligence and ideas, but then came a time I had to say I could not agree with his method or approach to arguing a case (his constant error being “confirmation bias”) — and since then he’s dropped regular reminders there about why I should never return to that snakepit.
Giuseppe — you are welcome to comment here with questions and civil disagreements but I apply the same rule to everyone as I apply to Tim O’Neill: no personal abusive or insulting language.
I’ve encountered claims that Josephus’s story of Paulina and Anubis there was a parody the story of Paul, but what if it’s the other way around? Couldn’t Paul have been created as a literary character from scratch by the evangelists, inspired by the story of Paulina? Then the core of the Acts could have preceded the letters.
An overly self-conscious person will interpret every move and word by others as being in some way about themselves. It is possible to interpret every ancient story that involves a priest or a deity with some remote analogy with something in the New Testament as being aimed at Christians.
Thank you v much, Neil. I hope your studies continue to repay .