Talk:Abomination of desolation

Kitchen is fringe

"Kenneth Kitchen, one of our greatest current Archaeologists" Kenneth Kitchen is not remotely reliable when it comes to Biblical history. The man has a serious bias: "Kitchen is an evangelical Christian, and has published frequently defending the historicity of the Old Testament. He is an outspoken critic of the documentary hypothesis, publishing various articles and books upholding his viewpoint, arguing from several kinds of evidence for his views showing that the depictions in the Bible of various historical eras and societies are consistent with historical data." In other words, Wikipedia:Fringe theories applies. In general evangelical pseudo-scholars should be distinguished from reliable, secular sources. Dimadick (talk) 13:01, 23 September 2018 (UTC)

I think Kitchen comes up so often in these sorts of discussions because he's a serious, credible scholar on Egypt but super-maximalist on ancient Israel and the Bible. It's like a trained rocket scientist opposing evolution -- the rhetorical gambit used is to transfer credibility from one field onto another one. That and his avoidance of full-blown Young-Earth-Creationism can create an impression that his works on the Bible are somehow mainstream. Alephb (talk) 19:24, 23 September 2018 (UTC)

@Oakes777: Please read the above. You are expected to abide by the website guideline WP:FRINGE.

Besides, nobody has denied that the Aramaic from the Book of Daniel is much older than Antiochus Epiphanes was. But that it a red herring, since nobody could prevent the author of that book from copying from a document containing older legends.

And I can grant the point that the consensus for JEDP is crumbling, but it is being replaced by views even more inimical to Kitchen, rather than by views more friendly to Kitchen. If he thinks that JEDP is wanton, then for him the present-day mainstream views are Helter Skelter. Of course, I am talking about the academic mainstream, not about people who weren't educated in Bible scholarship, and not about fundamentalist scholars. tgeorgescu (talk) 06:21, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

I think what needs to be emphasized here is that you can't give this undue weight. Newer editors generally don't understand that it's not that fringe information cannot be included at all, but that it has to be properly attributed and that it must be noted as a theory that is not broadly supported by scholarship in its field. Also, dropping it as a primary source in this way is Original Research (WP:NOR. "How" it is written and "what" is said is important. In other words, as @Tgeorgescu noted above, you actually have to read WP:FRINGE thoroughly. And what was added did not meet several guidelines other than FRINGE and would have been removed or severely edited even if it was something else (WP:OR, WP:EDITORIAL, WP:WEASEL, and citation MOS to name a few). ButlerBlog (talk) 13:23, 8 March 2022 (UTC)

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.

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.

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)

"a future eschatological (i.e., end-time) event,"

This question probably ties into the discussion section immediately above this, but: the text as we have it has a contradiction that seems rooted in disagreements over the time of the composition of the Gospels. Basically we say that the New Testament use of the phrase is in the context of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem. Modern academic consensus has Matthew and Luke, and probably Mark, as being composed after 70 AD (indeed, the passages in Mark are often taken as evidence that it can't have been composed in earlier than 70). However, we muddle the waters with a sentence (written twice, once in the lede and one in the article body) saying "in all three [gospels] it is likely that the authors had in mind a future eschatological (i.e., end-time) event, and perhaps the activities of some antichrist."

While we're not coming right out and saying it explicitly in that sentence, we seem to be saying that Jesus (or the writers of the Gospels) are predicting a future in these passages that would've been otherwise unknown to them; but the rest of the article seems to work on the assumption that in fact post-70 writers are alluding to the events of 70 (which they obviously would've known about from experience) in a passage where the narrative action takes place before 70, making it look like a prediction/prophecy. This is basically the same structure of what's happening in the Book of Daniel, when people in the 160s BC wrote a story taking place in the 4th century BC that alludes to/"predicts" events that the writers had already experienced.

My understanding is that the academic consensus is that, basically, people writing after 70 AD put a "prophecy" into Jesus's mouth in the Gospels of events that writers had already seen come to pass; I realize that for people who believe the Gospels are more-or-less accurate descriptions of what Jesus said and did, this is a problematic interpretation. If nothing else, we should make clear that we are talking about two different interpretations of the passages here, e.g., "[Source X/Y/Z] believes these passages were written after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and allude to it, while [Source Q] says that these are eschatological passages alluding to a predicted future antichrist's activities." But I wanted to see if I could get to some consensus here before wading into the article and starting to edit. --Jfruh (talk) 22:23, 11 November 2023 (UTC)