Talk:Abomination of desolation

I dispute the neutrality of the article

Whoever wrote the sections saying referring to the dating of the Gospels is clearly trying to push late dating and non-eyewitness authorship. Please rework to make it NPOV. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.231.143.5 (talk) 20:18, 5 June 2022 (UTC)

WP:NPOV means WP:NOTNEUTRAL. We kowtow to WP:RS/AC: in any major US university it is taught that the NT gospels are fundamentally anonymous. And that they were written at least 30 or 40 years after Jesus died.

Kowtow indeed, and agenda, doubly so. It's an agenda because your own declaration, right here, DOES NOT discredit the Synoptic Gospels being comprised of many anonymous, first-party sources. Larry Sanger noted that the greatest mistake in Wikipedia's development was its rejection of neutrality and its embrace of the notion of "equal weight." The concept of "undue weight" naturally produces a bias in favor of the zeitgeist of academia. This appears both in obvious situations (e.g. heliocentrism) and in political ones. In this article's case, the "no one who contributed to the Gospels, ever, were eyewitnesses of the Christ in any capacity" argument is so disingenuous, and so fabricated, that it is propaganda. NO ONE, and I do mean no one, disagrees that the Gospels were largely anonymous and compiled of many, many authors over several decades after Jesus died. I don't even disagree with that as a practicing Christian. Again, though, that is not what the article says. --107.203.166.49 (talk) 19:21, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

If you're here to fight against the zeitgeist of academia: take your business elsewhere. tgeorgescu (talk) 03:38, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

You don't even know what that means, do you? At least you are honest enough to admit that Wikipedia kowtows to an agenda instead of attempting even the illusion of impartiality. I double my emphasis on agenda, because Larry Sanger himself has declared his own creation to be malicious. NO ONE, and I do mean no one, disagrees that the Gospels were largely anonymous and compiled of many, many authors over several decades after Jesus died. --2600:1700:45DF:10:C0F4:537D:13CE:AAB8 (talk) 21:43, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

You don't even know what that means, do you? If you are here to toss insults, take your business elsewhere. WP:CIV O3000, Ret. (talk) 21:55, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

So, to answer your charge: this is not a bug, it's a feature. tgeorgescu (talk) 11:06, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

There are other points of view. "In any major university" ... weasel words. 63.231.143.5 (talk) 03:02, 18 June 2022 (UTC)

No, really: if there is a US state university which teaches for a fact that NT gospels are not fundamentally anonymous, that would be a wonder (meaning a full professor teaches it to its students, as opposed to being taught by some fleeting teaching assistant). If there is an Ivy League university which does that, it would be a wonder of wonders.

Again, that is not what I am countering. NO ONE, and I do mean no one, disagrees that the Gospels were largely anonymous and compiled of many, many authors over several decades after Jesus died. The bad faith propaganda statement IS NOT that the Gospels are anonymous. The bad faith propaganda statement IS NOT that the Gospels were written decades after 33-36 AD. The bad faith statement IS NOT that many, many authors contributed to the Gospels. The bad faith statement is: "no one who contributed to the Gospels, ever, were eyewitnesses of the Christ in any capacity." That is a statement so deliberately misrepresented (of its own references in line in the article) that the only people who say that are the fringe Redditors who think that a human being associated with founding Christianity (that is, Jesus) never existed. It's not even pretending to entertain anything short of the author's anti-theism. --2600:1700:45DF:10:C0F4:537D:13CE:AAB8 (talk) 21:43, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

The first fragmentary Gospel manuscript is long enough after Jesus' death to make it extremely unlikely that the writer was an eyewitness.

This is in any case utterly insignificant: ask any lawyer how reliable eyewitnesses are even a week after the event. What's in the Gospels is the story of the life of Jesus as related by early members of his cult. A reliable statement of what they believed, but not an historical account.

I don't know why people have a problem with this - anyone who tries to treat the Bible as a source of empirical fact inevitably ends up tying themselves in knots due to its internal contradictions, or its relating events that we have solid evidence never happened (like the conquest of Canaan).

I was watching a debate recently where a "Christian" was trying to categorize homosexuality and female emancipation as objectively wrong, per the "moral law" of the Bible, while waving away its support for rape and slavery as "judicial law" of the time and nothing to do with us, guv, honest -- as if Antebellum preachers had not used identical arguments to justify slavery. Conservatives, especially, seem to have a very à la carte approach to the Bible. They will go to war against homosexuality and abortion, about which Jesus says nothing -- or, more to the point, his early followers did not consider important enough to write a word about in the Gospels -- but will denounce anybody who suggests feeding the hungry, giving money to the poor, welcoming immigrants, or providing healthcare for those who need it, all of which are very firmly in the Gospels.

It always comes down to the words of men, versus the part you consider divine. If you think that every word of the Bible is divinely inspired and literally true, then congratulations, you're going to hell because you wear mixed fibres. If, like any rational person, you view the old testament as an unevenly-edited collection of folk myths, then the root of Christianity is the Gospels. And if you want to live Gospel values, good on you. They seem largely admirable. Guy (help! - typo?) 21:02, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

Rather weird. This started as a conversation on the dating of the canonical gospels. How did it turn on a long conversation about the lack of historicity of the Book of Joshua, Christianity's long-term misogyny and persecution of homosexuals, or the obvious fact that conservatives reject the ethics in the gospels? What does any of that have to do with the dating of four examples of gospels? Dimadick (talk) 23:10, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

If you're not yet convinced, see Ham, Ken; Hall, Greg; Beemer, Britt (2011). Already Compromised. Master Books. ISBN 978-0-89051-607-2. And Ham, Ken; Beemer, Britt; Hillard, Todd (2009). Already Gone: Why your kids will quit church and what you can do to stop it. New Leaf Publishing Group, Incorporated. ISBN 978-1-61458-003-4.

These might sound like conspiracy theories, but the basic facts are true: WP:SCHOLARSHIP, meaning Bible scholarship, has moved a lot from the position of the fundamentalist/traditionalist Christian true believer. tgeorgescu (talk) 15:23, 19 June 2022 (UTC)

Regardless of whether the statement is true it's irrelevant to the article and sticks out from the context of the rest of the section drawing undue attention to itself. Please remove. 74.98.214.45 (talk) 22:12, 12 December 2022 (UTC)

The dates of the gospels are highly relevant: the "abomination" they talk about is connected with the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, and the four were all written during or after that event (although Mark might have been slightly before). Achar Sva (talk) 21:17, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

There's your problem right there. Ken Ham thinks that 17th Century numerology defines the age of the Earth. He is not a dependable source for anything even tangentially related to objective fact.

And the reason kids will quit church, is preachers like Ken Ham. If you tell children that evolution is a lie and that anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar, and they start learning biology, which makes absolutely no sense without evolution, then sooner or later they are going to work out that the liar was the guy behind the pulpit. Guy (help! - typo?) 21:12, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

Deliberate Misrepresentation of Gospel Anonymity Into Zero First-Party Witnesses

The intentional rewriting of the scholarly belief that "the Gospels were written over several decades by many men, mostly anonymous" into "the Gospels' authors never saw Jesus, ever," is malicious propaganda designed to take jabs at Christendom. The explicit and intended purpose is to delegitimize the Gospels' account, rather than stating the fact that multiple men wrote them besides their namesakes, if their namesakes wrote anything at all. Indeed, deliberately claiming that all of the the Gospels as being written when all witnesses of Jesus had died, and that no one who contributed saw Jesus, is designed to undermine any credibility they had. It is the same intellectual dishonesty that claims Jesus never existed, and that He was a fabrication. "The Gospels have ZERO first-party sources" is propaganda, not fact, as opposed to "the namesakes of the Gospels were not the sole authors and the Gospels were compiled over decades."

What the article does is deliberately misinterpret the fact that much of the Gospels were almost certainly written by men who were not the Gospels' titular writers, into propaganda that no first-party accounts of Jesus exist in Christendom. Instead, it fabricates the absolute lie, one as laughable as "Jesus did not exist," that the Gospels have zero basis in the actual events they feature. Whoever penned this had an overt, even hateful agenda. I doubt any man would dare say this about the Qu'ran without fear of his execution: there is no one, ever, who asserts that the men who compiled the Qu'ran were not eyewitnesses to Muhammad's conquests, and no one doubts the legitimacy of the secular aspects of the accounts. This stands in Christendom as well: first-party sources directly contributed to the Gospels.

The consensus I've seen over the years is that Mark was the first and oldest Gospel, dating to as early as 45-50 AD. The rest of the Synoptic Gospels were written about thirty to forty years after Jesus' Death and Resurrection. The Gospel of John was written around 100 AD and had the least first-party sources (and was probably from oral tradition in several chunks), largely because it focused on theological elements and natures of the Godhead and Co-Eternity of God the Son, as in John 1.

It is almost universally believed that the Gospels had more than one author. I've never seen anyone in academia not say this. Matthew, Mark, Like, and John were, in some manner, contributors, but by no means the sole authors, and the assertion that the Gospels were collections of eyewitness accounts from those alive at Jesus' time is not disputed. No one believes one man sat down and wrote them at once, and no one questions this consensus that many people wrote the Gospels.

However, that's not what the criticized writing says. Men defending the propagandic statement say "no college on earth disagrees that the Gospels are fundamentally anonymous," which is a correct statement, and also NOT what the propaganda said.

The man who wrote this passage had deliberate, malicious intent that is in no way reflective of the idea that the Gospels did not have one author, and were not compiled all at once. We simply cannot assume good faith, espectially when everyone making the argument in its favor is literally making the argument that the Gospels had several anonymous arguments. The statement being challenged does not say that; it says no one who contributed to the Gospels, NO ONE, ever saw Jesus in any capacity. It is a denial of the Gospels as first-party sources in any capacity, and is a farce I'd sooner see on Reddit than a cite claiming to be encyclopedic. You might as well pretend Jesus never actually existed at all.

The correct wording of the sentence is this:

"It is almost certain that most of the contributors of the Gospels were both diverse and fundamentally anonymous, and that the passage in Mark, the earliest Gospel, was a point of reference for 'abomination of desolation' by the authors of Matthew and Luke."

To say otherwise is to reject the very sources cited in the article.

--107.203.166.49 (talk) 19:29, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

Reddish 2011, p. 13: "This assumption is often coupled with the beliefs that the authors of the four Gospels were eyewitnesses of the events they narrate and that the composition of the Gospels was a relatively simple process of preserving in writing what they had seen and heard firsthand. Such assumptions about the Gospels, however, are inaccurate. [...] The authors of the Gospels, or at least the persons responsible for the final form of the Gospels, were almost certainly not eyewitnesses; and the Gospels themselves are the end products of traditions that were transmitted and preserved in various forms, both oral and written."

- Your quote seems to imply that I am arguing that Mark (for example) sat down and write his namesake Gospel all by himself in 37 AD. That's not what I am saying. That's not what I meant, or what the sources meant, and it reinforces my earlier point. The article falsely claimed that no one who contributed to any of the the Gospels were first-party sources who actually saw any of the events they recorded. This is completely false. All of the Gospels were compiled within seventy years of Jesus' Death, meaning that most first-party sources, including the titular namesakes, would have been alive and available, at least in part. Heck, Luke never met the Christ and recorded his contributions through first-party interviews, making him a primary source. IIRC, neither did Mark ever walk with Jesus. Mark's Gospel was first compiled in 50 AD and John's Gospel was compiled around 90-110 AD. Mark and John were not the sole authors, of course, and I am not saying that, despite your citation asserting that I believed this. --107.203.166.49 (talk) 02:30, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

The mainstream academic view is: Oral gospel traditions.

- The idea that multiple anonymous authors contributed to the final compilation of the Gospels, or that it was not literally a single man writing what he saw and then translating it from the point of Jesus' ascension into Heaven, IS NOT what I am saying was a malicious wording or unsupported. That is not what I was disputing. The mainstream academic view is that the Gospels did not literally have a single author, and that none of the Gospels were written until decades after Jesus died. We all know this. My attempted correction is against a malicious rewording of an universally accepted fact. To say that no one who wrote the Gospels saw Jesus when He was alive was absurd, given the fact that the earliest written collections that became Gospels existed when the people who saw Jesus were still living. In other words, the way that was worded was intentionally designed to paint the Gospels as forgeries with no actual connection to any eyewitnesss that saw the Christ. That is why I submitted the correction. --107.203.166.49 (talk) 02:30, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

Another argument: Christianity began as a religion about the death and resurrection of Jesus. Initially, it wasn't a religion about the teachings of Jesus. Those weren't its core message. tgeorgescu (talk) 20:21, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

Bad Faith Reversion

Someone apparently reinstated the deliberately malicious propaganda in bad faith. Again, there is a deliberate misrepresentation of the actual source it cites to twist it to mean something it doesn't.

The man who wrote this passage had deliberate, malicious intent that is in no way reflective of the idea that the Gospels did not have one author, and were not compiled all at once. We simply cannot assume good faith, especially when everyone making the argument in its favor is literally making the argument that the Gospels had several anonymous arguments. The statement being challenged does not say that; it says that NO ONE who contributed to the Gospels, NO ONE, ever saw Jesus in any capacity. It is a denial of the Gospels as first-party sources in any capacity, and is a farce I'd sooner see on Reddit than a site claiming to be encyclopedic. You might as well pretend Jesus never actually existed at all. I am not challenging that the Gospels were almost entirely anonymous. I am not challenging that the Gospels had multiple authors. I am challenging the bad faith contortion of the sources given to imply that the Gospels were, first, not compiled within the lifetime of those who would have seen Jesus and, second, that the Gospels are a complete fabrication with no primary source connection of any kind.

The fact that whoever reverted the changes acted without notifying the talk page proves it was a deliberate and intentionally bad faith action.

--2600:1700:45DF:10:C0F4:537D:13CE:AAB8 (talk) 21:33, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

Let me say this: the idea that Jesus never existed is WP:FRINGE. The mainstream academic view is that the NT gospels were written based upon oral gospel traditions. I.e., in Ehrman's view, a game of telephone played across several countries and several languages.

Stated otherwise, it was very difficult to interview people who lived thousands of miles away from the writer. And early Christians did not have secret handshakes, so one could not tell if their interviewee was actually a witness to Jesus' life or merely bragging that they were.

Apostle Paul did interview people about Jesus. But what he reported about that? Almost nothing about the actual biography and teachings of Jesus. tgeorgescu (talk) 22:22, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

50 AD

"Gospel of Mark compiled around 50 AD" is WP:FRINGE. tgeorgescu (talk) 23:46, 4 March 2025 (UTC)

Hogwash. The Gospel of Mark being the earliest Gospel is an universally agreed argument in both secular and religious academia. That's why many Bibles depict its last passage as "torn off." --2600:1700:45DF:10:C0F4:537D:13CE:AAB8 (talk) 21:35, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

The Gospel of Mark being the earliest Gospel is an universally agreed argument in both secular and religious academia. True, but irrelevant. The mainstream academic view is that the Gospel of Mark was written about 70 CE, give or take one or two years.

In other words, you may claim that you don't like the mainstream academic view, but you may not claim that it isn't the mainstream academic view. tgeorgescu (talk) 19:33, 27 July 2025 (UTC)

The problem was as tgeorgescu notes above., it's 70±2, not 50. And as far as I know, there is no complete copy earlier than about 350CE, and the earliest manuscript fragment is from ca. 200CE. I'm not sure how much we have in Aramaic at all, I think virtually all the sources are translations into Greek. One of my former ministers had read many of the original Greek sources, he was an historian and a fluent Greek and Latin reader. Oh, also? You might want to read Fahrenheit 451.

For what it's worth, I think it's reasonably likely that Jesus existed. And the Gospels offer a markedly better value system than the unevenly-edited collection of Bronze Age folk myths that is the Old Testament. Everything after the gospels is self-serving, of course, but the Sermon on the Mount is pretty damn woke for its time, albeit that it would be foolish to believe that one single word of it is accurately recorded. Guy (help! - typo?) 20:41, 27 July 2025 (UTC)