Monday Morning Demagoguery

This is why we can’t have nice things.  The demagogues like to tell us that those nice things are actually shit sandwiches.  To wit, this quote from the Rev. Thomas Euteneuer, the president of some stupid anti-gay group called Human Life International:

[A] society cannot long survive this kind of violence done to its basic values, and history surely shows many societies like Ancient Greece, whose rapid decline was preceded by the proliferation of the gay lifestyle and its public acceptance.

The rapid decline of Ancient Greece?  Really?  You mean the society that lasted for a good, oh, six centuries whilst allowing (encouraging?  Idealizing?) homosexual activity throughout?  You mean the tiny collection of city-states and their colonies that managed to basically conquer the entire known world, taking down the greatest empire to date in the process?  You mean the society that had an indelible impact on the Roman Empire and Byzantium?  You mean the society that indirectly caused the Renaissance when the first Humanists began to bring Greek manuscripts back to Western Europe?

That society?

If that’s your definition of “rapid decline,” I’d say you should encourage homosexuality in America, Reverend Euteneuer.  That means America will be certain to maintain a dominant world position for several centuries, which will be followed by an impact that reverberates through the next two millennia.

I’d take it.

(via Right Wing Watch, by the by)

On a Related Note

There's this note about Shakespeare denialism over at Unreasonable Faith.  It seems germane to the discussions we've been having about history over in our neck of the woods...

The Terracina Hypothesis

This is a thought experiment based on the discussion that has been started on the whole 99.6% accuracy of the New Testament claim made by Ravi Zacharias in the video I posted yesterday. It is an attempt to explain why brute-force calculation using numbers and relative ages doesn’t mean a damn thing.

Let us, for the sake of argument, invent a historical event. Let’s say that after the decisive Battle of Cannae, but before the extended stalemate/delaying tactics period, the possibility has arisen that the Romans and Carthaginians fought one more major battle near the city of Terracina. Let’s say that it’s something that has been hinted at, but there was no direct evidence and precious little indirect evidence until recently when a series of manuscripts were discovered that had previously unknown historical documents and have allowed us to track down a larger collection of previously unknown documents, including several dozen records of the Battle of Terracina.

Historians immediately begin rifling through the documents, excitedly attempting to pick apart this heretofore undocumented battle. But they quickly run in to a problem. Some of the documents claim that the battle took place near Terracina. Some claim that they took place near a city a few miles away called Ad Turres. Some documents claim that Hannibal won the battle handily, while some claim that the Romans very nearly carried the day before being forced to retreat when one of their key commanders died. A pattern quickly emerges where in all but one case the documents that say the battle was fought at Ad Turres was an unquestioned victory for Hannibal and the documents that say the battle was fought at Terracina was a close-fought thing. But that one remaining document says that Hannibal won the battle decisively at Terracina. It, unlike the other two, is also the only document that does not reference previous works. It also contains information that is repeated in all of the other documents, much of which is shared across both sides types, but it has a lot of unique data and points out several unique features of the terrain around Terracina.

No documents can be dated before the year 100 CE, more than three centuries after the Second Punic War. But the document from 100 CE is, in fact, the one unique document.

The historians see the pattern and formulate what’s called the Terracina Hypothesis. They posit that the singular document is based on the oldest source and, therefore, that the one, single document (known as T1) that says that Hannibal won a decisive victory near Terracina is the oldest, with the other documents all based off of it. Further, they posit that the two different tales depend on two later modifications different modifications. They hypothesize that there were two different documents, now known as X1 (antecedent to the Ad Turres documents) and Y1 (antecedent to the Terracina documents), that both made mistakes and were copied forward, while the T1 document was lost to the historical record sometime around 100 CE.[1]

This is where the Hannibal at Terracina story rests for about a decade. Books are written about it, textbooks modified to indicate it. Everyone is satisfied by the explanation. Then two things happen.[2]

A certain Professor Jones then begins a close study of the various Terracina sources for an upcoming book, during which he discovers two things that had been missed before.

First, The T1 document makes reference to several place names that did not exist before 50 BCE. The document also makes reference to a prominent citizen of the city who was not alive during the Second Punic War, but who has been referenced as living in the area a generation later. Originally these errors were taken as alternate spellings of similar places that were known to exist in Terracina and an individual who was known to be a minor Roman general at the time of the Second Punic War. This new information casts doubt on the validity of the T1 document and it’s placement as the original document. Second, he discovers that there was a mis-translation of a section that only survives in one of the documents that claims the battle occurred near Ad Turres. According to the original translation, the scribe who wrote the document had claimed to be making a copy of someone else’s copy of the original, but he actually claimed to have been entrusted with the original document and was working off of it. This may or may not be the truth, but the those two bits of information are enough to cast serious doubt on the Terracina Hypothesis.

Meanwhile, an archaeological expedition operating near the ancient town of Terracina made two interesting discoveries. The first is that there are an awful lot of Carthaginian artifacts in the area and there is evidence that there was, in fact, a battle.[3] The second is that it’s still possible to make out several different landmarks mentioned in all three accounts. This provides strong evidence that all three accounts recorded the same events.

Our professor from above takes the new information he has uncovered and the new archaeological evidence and formulates a new hypothesis. He theorizes that there was, in fact, a X1 document and a Y1 document. But they did not follow the T1 document, but were the independent creation of two different writers while T1 came from a third source.

The biggest obstacle is, of course, the different city names given. X1, according to the new hypothesis, was simply written by a scribe who was a bit lost and didn’t know the name of the actual city near which the battle took place. Accurate descriptions of the immediate terrain lend credibility to the account.

But what of the other discrepancies? The professor’s hypothesis explains it thusly:

The Battle of Terracina was the first major battle after Hannibal completely wiped out the Roman legions at Cannae, which followed Hannibal’s decisive victories at Lake Trasimene and Trebia. Another decisive victory would cause complete despair in Rome and invite the possibility of a complete victory for Hannibal if he could figure out how to exploit the situation. The Y1 document, then, was a bit of Roman propaganda, to say, “Well, Hannibal won, but we bloodied him pretty well and he’ll have to be far more careful in the future.” The X1 document, meanwhile, was written by someone traveling with Hannibal who did not know the area, but recorded a great Carthaginian victory, possibly as propaganda, but equally likely to be an accurate account of the battle due to the consistent Roman inability to deal with Hannibal. The T1 document, meanwhile, was actually the last document produced. It was based, at least partially, on some sort of local tradition, most likely oral, which had been modified slightly between the original event and when it was finally recorded, thus accounting for the inconsistencies in place names.

This theory then becomes known as the Jones Hypothesis. Jones presents it at a symposium and publishes some papers. Several other historians review his papers and take a look at his sources, re-check his translations, and do the whole peer review thing. They conclude that it’s a good theory. It is then largely accepted as the most likely explanation for what happened at Terracina and why we have three different stories and becomes the standard academic explanation for what happened. This does not mean it is universally accepted. Some historians still hold to the old Terracina Hypothesis. But the general consensus falls to the side that Jones has the right idea.

Interestingly enough, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the Jones Hypothesis is right. It may well be that the Romans nearly did win the day and no propaganda was needed on the Roman side. It might also be that there was no battle, but that Hannibal’s army encamped in that location and two factions in his army that was a large collection of disparate peoples from all over started fighting each other in an event that was later recorded as a major battle. But the Jones Hypothesis best fits the information we have available, which is why it is generally accepted within the academic community.

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Now, then, I’ve told a story here about the formulation of two different hypotheses about a historical event. Even though I’ve made the event up, we can say for the sake of the illustration that we’re reasonably sure that the event actually did happen. Note what we had available: several different accounts that differed in specifics but agreed on a general idea of what happened. Note, too, what we did not have: original source documents or, for that matter, any documents dated within three centuries of the event. To this we then added archaeological evidence and external research (the place names given and whatnot).

Note, though, the thing that no one in this story did at any point: add up the number of manuscripts found and divide by their proximity to the original event in order to come up with some bullshit, hyper-accurate statistic of “accuracy.” That’s history, that’s propaganda. What the actual (pretend) historians did was take the various accounts, figure out the points of difference and commonality, and iron out a specific narrative.

If you’re reading this and you’re the sort of person who wants to believe Ravi Zacharias, I’d be willing to bet you just thought, “But you’ve just disproved your original point!” And if you didn’t think that, well, I’m going to just hand you a freebie right here. So, y’know, pay attention.

“Aha,” you’ll point out, imaginary internet debate partner, “Doesn’t the huge number of New Testament manuscripts we know of mean that we can be sure we have created an accurate composite of the story of Jesus. Perhaps even, I don’t know, 99.6% sure? Doesn’t that just prove the New Testament is true?”

The short answer is, “No.” But I’m guessing that you’ll be wanting the long answer. You imaginary internet debate partners are so hard to please.

In the book Misquoting Jesus, Bart Ehrman tells a story about a page from the Codex Vaticanus he has hanging in his office. His explanation of the paper is basically this: there is a passage at the beginning of Hebrews that contains the Greek word PHERON[4] in most manuscripts. The passage translates to “Christ bears all things by the word of his power. In the original of the Codex Vaticanus, however, the scribe replaced PHERON with PHANERON,[5] which translates to “Christ manifests all things by the word of his power.” Another scribe later came along and replaced “manifests” with “bears.” Still later another scribe came and put “manifests” back in, then added the note, “Fool and knave! Leave the old reading, don’t change it!” Ehrman then says:

I have a copy of the page framed and hanging on the wall above my desk as a constant reminder about scribes and their proclivities to change, and rechange, the texts. Obviously it is the change of a single word: so why does it matter? It matters because the only way to understand what an author wants to say is to know what is words – all his words – actually were. (Think of all the sermons preached on the basis of a single word in a text: what if the word is one the author didn’t actually write?) Saying that Christ reveals all things by his word of power is quite different from saying that he keeps the universe together by his word!

Bear in mind, too, that the Codex Vaticanus is one of those 5600 source documents that supposedly creates a 99.6% accuracy. Counted among them, too, is the P52 fragment mentioned by BeamStalk in the comments on the first Ravi Zacharias entry. Well, actually, to call P52 a fragment is practically an insult to fragments everywhere. Not only does it not contain a complete book of the New Testament, it doesn’t even contain a complete thought couched in a single complete sentence.

And this doesn’t even get in to the fact that the writers of the four Gospels had different ideas about what the Christ story actually meant. It doesn’t get in to the fact that Paul wrote his epistles without a full knowledge of the Christ story or a complete understanding of it’s importance. It doesn’t get in to the fact that the letters attributed to Paul offer a somewhat different theology than the one attributed to James and are still different from the letters attributed to Peter. For that matter, the letters attributed to Paul offer a different theology than the letters attributed to Paul that we’re pretty sure Paul didn’t actually write (basically, the three “pastoral epistles:” 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus).

Meanwhile, there’s an extremely important bit of this discussion that I haven’t even encroached upon. It boils down to a simple concept:

There’s no one telling me that I will go to Hell if I don’t accept the Jones Hypothesis to explain the Battle of Terracina.

When people like Ravi Zacharias trot out their stupid statistics to explain why the Bible we have today is a more accurate book than, say, Homer’s Illiad or the Histories of Herodotus, they unwittingly do the Bible a great disservice. See, I don’t have to believe that Helen of Troy actually had a face capable of launching a thousand ships that then remained beached outside of Troy until the night a large wooden horse filled with Greeks was wheeled up to the gates.[6] And I don’t have to accept Herodotus’s version of the Life of Cyrus as the absolute, definitive story of the life and times of Cyrus the Great.

So, yes, we can have a pretty good idea that we have the ability to find an accurate picture of the New Testament. But that just means that the New Testament is subject to the same exact scrutiny I’d place the Illiad or the Life of Cyrus under. And under that scrutiny the New Testament fails miserably, as it is an internally inconsistent document that is not well-supported by external evidence. In fact, it’s basically not supported by any external evidence. And there’s actually external evidence that neatly undercuts the validity of the Bible.

You have to approach the Bible with the attitude that you will believe it in order to believe it. So when an apologist like Ravi Zacharias makes the argument that you can support the Bible with historical evidence what he actually does is undercut the validity of the said document. He invites inquiry of the document and insists that the Christian faith will fall apart if the Bible is shown to be unreliable.

Skeptical inquiry in to the Bible does exactly that.

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[1]This is, basically, a modified use of the “Two-Source Hypothesis” of the origin of the four Gospels, natch.

[2]Everything here is massively oversimplified. I’m creating a scenario and attempting to tell a quick and useful story about how historians do things. That means that an awful lot of convenient things have to happen to make the narrative, y’know, work and be usefully easy to understand.

[3]Generally speaking, the evidence of battle takes the form of two things: discarded, damaged, and broken implements of war and graves. The occupants of said graves generally provide evidence that they did not go peacefully in to that good night. There will be shattered skulls, broken bones, and no evidence that the bones had the time to heal. You could basically call Ducky to the scene of an ancient battlefield and he’d be able to do his thing right there. With some modification.

Either way, if you get enough bodies from the same general time period in the same place you can generally determine if you’re looking at the local cemetery or a battlefield. You can also generally determine if the people died violently or peacefully. It’s exceptionally hard to figure out the precise circumstances of death, however. By which I mean, we could determine there was a battle, but not who won or who killed whom in the process.

[4]There’s an accent mark on the O that I’m not entirely sure how to reproduce. But it doesn’t technically matter for the purposes of my retelling of Ehrman’s story.

[5]Again with accent marks…

[6]For that matter, I don’t. One of the weasel things Bible “historians” do is point to archaeological evidence to show that there were cities and whatnot in the Middle East and Levant in the Bible times and crow, “See, the Bible is right!” Archaeological evidence has shown there was a city in Troy and has shown that one of the incarnations of Troy was destroyed at about the time Homer’s Illiad would have existed. That doesn’t mean that Achilles, Hector, and Menelaus were there. And Athena, Apollo, and Zeus sure as shit weren’t, either. Oh, and Hephaestus probably didn’t forge[7] the armor of Achilles in the fires of Olympus, in case you’re wondering.

[7]Word 2007 insists that I want to use the word "forget" here.  I'll be honest, I find the red lines and spelling auto-correct to be helpful sometimes (but don't get me started on the iPhone's auto-correct.  Every single time I try to write "hell" it changes the word to "he'll."  That's annoying as he'll).  I find the green lines to be helpful sometimes, specifically since I have a bad habit of hitting the space bar twice very quickly without realizing it and I do have a habit of writing sentences that don't exactly have specific subject-verb agreement in them when I'm getting flowery.  So the grammar correct can help me keep an eye on some things.  But, so help me, I have no clue what the hell they were thinking with the little blue squiggly lines.

Ravi Zacharias Disproves Biblical Literalism

Sadly, he doesn’t realize this is what happens and, rather, thinks he’s defending the whole thing.

Either way, I had about four different posts I could have written this evening.  Then, towards the end of my work day, I found someone from my former life had posted this video on Facebook.  Said friend was, I have no doubt, intending to use this video to bolster the message of the Bible and apologetics, not the other way around.  But I shall use it to show that it’s extremely easy to debunk standard Biblical apologetics, and further to show why they seem so very convincing.



Either way, the video is from a talk given by Ravi Zacharias, a fairly well-known evangelist, at the University of Illinois.  A student asks him why I would uncharitably tend to label as a set up question.

I just wanted to ask you, could you explain in a manner more pragmatic than we’re used to why a person should believe in the word of god as the Bible and why they should basically believe every word it says as opposed to any other “holy” [air quotes and everything] book and why they should give their entire lives to Christ.(23 seconds in)

Yeah, seriously.  That’s his question.  And it’s intended to get a set answer, roughly broken down in to, “This is why the Bible is correct, this is why everything else is wrong, and this is why you should accept Jesus.”  The student in question will then, theoretically, be able to go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations because of the Ravi Zacharias method of proving the Bible is the most believable document in the history of the universe.  So how does Zacharias respond?

First, with a whole bunch of mealy-mouthed philosophical garbage.

Let me start off as best as I can.  First, I believe that truth as a category does exist.  Number two, it is possible, in a majority of claims of philosophical and historical statements to verify the truthfulness of those affirmations.  Third, I believe there are existential realities from which I cannot run which drive me to find the answers to the existential questions that I live with, not just the philosophical ones.  The philosophical ones are real and I have to deal with them, but so are the existential ones. (1:17 in)

This is an awful lot of words that say absolutely nothing.  Let’s break it down in to its component ideas.  He basically says that he believes truth exists, that truth can be supported by human thought and human history, and that it’s important to pursue truth, not just as a thought exercise, but as an attempt to give meaning to human existence.  There is nothing wrong with this, but it doesn’t say anything.  More precisely, it doesn’t say anything about the Bible or why the Bible would hold truth.  Mostly, it doesn’t explain why we should look to the Bible for truth.

But it uses a lot of big words and sounds really, really smart.  And I’m reasonably certain that’s what it’s there for.

Then he tosses in the most random and oversimplified explanation of existentialism I’ve ever heard, in which he says it’s a rejection of rationalism and an appeal to, as Zacharias puts it “gut level feeling.”  As someone who has read his own fair share of existentialist thought and is prone to identify himself as one, I have no idea where that idea would possibly come in to play, as existentialism was the realization that relentless rationalistic thinking wasn’t overly helpful in understanding people and the true quest for any person was to figure out how to give their own life meaning.  This doesn’t reject rationalism so much as it admits that people aren’t unfailingly rational and probably aren’t ever going to be capable of becoming unfailingly rational.  But that’s neither here nor there, as I have no clue what existentialism has to do with explaining why we should believe every word of the Bible and give our entire lives to Jesus.  So I’ll just skip on ahead a bit.

You start off by saying, if you take the Bible at the question then why the Bible and why not any other system of thought?  You start off with the scriptures and ask yourself the question, here there are sixty-six books by nearly forty different authors over nearly fifteen hundred years that are books on history, that are books on philosophical thinking, that are books on theological thinking and systematic thinking [note, I’ll buy the first three, but I fail to see how the Bible has books on “systematic thinking”].  Now, if the Bible made several assertions one after another that you found out to be false, either historically or philosophically or in the existential realm, you go further and further and if you see that kind of systemic contradiction and failure then you have reason to believe that I cannot really trust this document it is not in keeping with the way I am seeing history and reality. (2:23 in)

I find this fascinating, because what Zacharias is explaining here is more or less exactly the path which I took to stop believing in the Bible and, ultimately, to decide to leave Christianity behind.  He even goes on to use one of the earliest parts of the Bible that caused me to begin questioning the validity of the Bible in an attempt to prove the Bible.  But I’ll cross that bridge when Zacharias does.

Anyway, what I’d like to point out here is that Zacharias actually neatly lays out the flaws in fundamentalist/Biblical literalist thinking.  If your entire belief system depends on the thing you believe in being without flaw, then in the presence of flaws you either have to give up on the belief system or give up on reality.  There’s really no way around it.  It sets up exactly the sort of impossible arrangement that forces people to leave, live with cognitive dissonance, or remain purposefully ignorant of any data outside of that which is supported by the Bible.  That’s why Christianity has a cottage industry of people who create books about history and creationism and then attempt to get those things taught in school.

They use “teach the controversy” to create wedges in education.  But they don’t simply want their garbage taught in schools, they want reality removed.  Because reality threatens Biblical literalism.  The city known as Jericho has been inhabited since before the universe was created.  The World Flood occurred during the Old Kingdom period in Egypt.  We have no archaeological or documentary evidence for a massive settlement of Jews in Egypt, nor do we have evidence of a mass exodus and re-settling of said Jews.  The Biblical account of Persian succession is just flat-out wrong.  And it offers three contradictory accounts of the rise of the Persians and return of the Jews to Israel.  There is no evidence that Caesar Augustus called for a census of the entire world that required everyone to go back to their home (which is a stupid thing to do, anyway.  I filled out a census form a couple months ago.  Guess where I said I lived?  Texas.  Why?  Because I currently live in Texas, even if I spent my entire life prior to January 8, 2010 as a resident of Illinois).

Either way, Zacharias then devolves in to an explanation of why the Bible is better than the Qu’ran.  It basically boils down to, “The Muslims say that the Qu’ran is literally the perfect word of Allah.  But the Bible is better because it isn’t perfect.  It just perfectly predicts the future.”  It’s a bit that starts at 3:10 and doesn’t get anywhere close to logic.  Or Yuma, for that matter.  And it hinges on an extremely bizarre definition of “perfection” which he basically reduces to nit-picking over what words are “better than” others.

This, for the record, is a terrible definition of “perfection.”  I could make a grammatically perfect statement like, say, “I drive a Maserati GranTurismo.”  The sentence is in the right order.  There is a verb and a subject.  So it’s a perfectly formed statement.  Except for the bit where I have never driven a Maserati, never sat in a Maserati, and just so happen to drive a Mazda 6 (with which I am quite happy, thankyouverymuch).  Now, by most definitions a Maserati GranTurismo is, in fact, “better than” my Mazda 6.  Except the statement doesn’t reflect reality, which would be accurately stated even if the sentence was, “I gone done drived a Mazda 6 to work today.”

What’s my point?  Zacharias is picking nits here.  Muslim claims of revealed truth hinge on claims that the Qu’ran is the perfect, revealed word of Allah.  The question that Zacharias is answering hinges on the claim that the Bible is the Word of God and we should believe every word in it.  These are, in effect, two claims to the perfection of two different holy books.  And Zacharias has potentially painted himself in to a corner by arguing that you cannot trust the Bible if you find that it keeps making false assertions.  So his next step is an appeal to prophecy.

Let me give you an example of this.  The Book of Daniel is written in the late 500s before Christ and yet when you study the book of Daniel you begin to see the specifics of a fantastic prophecy.  He talks about a massive empire that will come in to being and how that empire will be divided in to four and that empire will be led by what they call a strident, strong he-goat from the west who will be marching several nations under foot but shall be suddenly cut off and his empire will be divided in to four.  Those four then merge in to two and those two blend in to one.  When you take the book of Daniel, written late 500s, and put it pro-forma on to Alexander the Great in the 300s before Christ you see the stridency of Alexander, suddenly cut off in his 20s, four kingdoms emerge, given to his four generals, those four come in to two, the Ptolemaic and the Seleucid Empires, that merged then in to the Roman Empire.  Centuries before to be so specific in prophecy. (4:19 in)

I remember being about 18 or 19.  I’d finally decided I was going to really get serious about following Christ and incorporating the teachings of the Bible in to my own life.  My plan was to do the whole reading through the Bible in a year thing.  I apparently managed to make it all the way up to Daniel, which kind of surprises me.  I don’t ever remember making it much past Joshua during those attempts to do the Bible in a year thing.  Perhaps I was doing something else and happened to read Daniel for the first time at this same juncture in my life and have just combined the two memories.  Either way, I confronted Daniel for the first time.  And not the Daniel and the lion’s den story or the Rack, Shack, and Benny story.  I read the prophecies.

I remember, specifically, reading the stuff about the one-horned goat charging in from the west, laying waste to all that opposed him, specifically a two-horned ram.  Then goat’s single horn fell off and was replaced by four horns, then two, then one.  Daniel then helpfully explained that the ram was the Persians, which the Bible splits in to the Medes and the Persians (for reasons that, honestly, don’t make much sense.  The Medes were a kingdom and the Persians their neighbors and/or vassals.  Then the Persians conquered the Medes on their way to conquering, well, everyone but the Greeks, basically.  There is no mention of this construct of “Medes and Persians” in the Persians’ own history that I’m aware of).  The goat’s one horn was Alexander the Great, then the four horns were four successor kingdoms.

I found this absolutely fascinating.  So fascinating, in fact, that I decided it was one of those places where the Bible could be proven to be accurately prophetic.  I was shocked to discover that there were way more than four successor kingdoms.  There were more like twelve.

It eventually settled down to four kingdoms, plus an independent Epirus, after the battle of Ipsus in 301 BCE.  But then there was intrigue in Macedon and that left the borders open for a Gallic invasion of Asia Minor.  When Rome came on to the scene the old Alexandrian Empire was split between the Ptolemies, who held Egypt and Syria, as well as Cyprus and a few bits of Asia Minor, the Seleucids, who held the vast majority of the territory from Afghanistan to the Ionian coast, the Antigonids, who held Macedonia, and the Aetolian League, which were a bunch of semi-independent city-states in mainland Greece.

Now, this whole thing might seem like picking nits.  But the “prophesy” of Daniel as explained by Zacharias doesn’t actually hold up in light of, y’know, reality.  There is an alternate explanation, however.  Let us consider verses 23 through 26 of Daniel 8:

“In the latter period of their rule, when the transgressors have run their course, a king will arise, insolent and skilled in intrigue.
"His power will be mighty, but not by his own power, and he will destroy to an extraordinary degree and prosper and perform his will; he will destroy mighty men and the holy people.
"And through his shrewdness he will cause deceit to succeed by his influence; and he will magnify himself in his heart, and he will destroy many while they are at ease. He will even oppose the Prince of princes, but he will be broken without human agency. "The vision of the evenings and mornings which has been told is true; but keep the vision secret, for it pertains to many days in the future."

The interesting thing about this is that there is a very specific and particular king to which this could easily refer: Antiochus IV Epiphanes of the Seleucids.  Basically, Antiochus IV was a usurper of the Seleucid crown who was considered to be mad, so much so that he was given the nickname “Epimanes,” which means “The Mad One.”  Over the course of his life, Antiochus IV raided the Temple in Jerusalem, outlawed traditional Judaism, attempted to force the Jews to worship Zeus, and was ultimately struck down by disease during the Maccabean Revolt.

Certain theologians, including John Drane and Bryan Rennie, associate the Nebuchadnezzar of the book of Daniel with Antiochus IV Epiphanes.  Basically, the attempts to force everyone to worship a large golden idol, which led to the whole Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego story, sound a lot like the stories of Antiochus IV attempting to get the Jews to worship Zeus.  The bit about Nebuchadnezzar going mad sounds a lot like Antiochus IV’s own purported madness.  There’s also a bit at the beginning of Daniel 5 about Belshazzar, the king who succeeded Nebuchadnezzar in the book of Daniel and eventually died and was replaced by Darius the Mede (all of which is BS.  The father of Belshazzar was Nabonidus, who was actually still alive and kinda-sorta in charge when Babylon was conquered.  By Cyrus the Great) holding a feast and requesting all of the gold drinking cups that were taken from the Temple by his father.  Moreover, Jewish numerology associates Nebuchadnezzar with Antiochus IV Epiphanes.  I’ll allow Bryan Rennie to argue that point for me.

Either way, Daniel 8 contains a brilliant little prophecy of Antiochus IV Epiphanes.  Except modern scholarship also tends to place the writing of the book of Daniel after Antiochus IV Epiphanes.  Moreover, the Jewish Tanakh places Daniel not in the books of prophecy, but in the third section, the Ketuvim, or “Writings.”  This indicates that the compilers of the Jewish canon did not see Daniel as being a prophetic book, but instead a work of history and/or allegory.  This is also interesting, as the Nevi’im includes the books that cover the time from the entrance to the Promised Land until the Babylonian Captivity, but does not include Chronicles or Daniel, indicating that both of those books were written later.  This is probably key to understanding the historicity and prophetic validity of the book of Daniel.

But I digress.

Zacharias takes the basic statement, “The Bible has accurately predicted the future.”  He follows it up with proof in the form of, “Look at the book of Daniel.”  The next thirty seconds of the video then basically say, “Since we can believe this prophecy from Daniel, we can believe all the prophecies that point to Christ.”  I can go back to this another time, but I’ll gloss over it quickly.  No, we can’t.  If you read the Old Testament as a narrative of Jewish history and thought it makes sense.  But if you read it with the intention of finding Jesus, you have to hop, skip, and jump around, take things out of context, and generally bollix up the whole thing.  You have to eisegete Jesus in to the Old Testament in order for any of the arguments of the Old Testament’s prophetic powers to even make a lick of sense.

The thing to realize is that Zacharias has not actually managed to formulate a defensible apologia for the accuracy of Biblical prophecy.  But he has created a form of, to borrow from Stephen Colbert, truthiness.  It sounds good, but in order to understand why it is not, in fact, good argumentation you have to really get down in to the weeds and understand that the Bible is an extremely inaccurate historical document.

My confrontation with the reality of the successor kingdoms was the first time I had an inkling of that.  I did what anybody does the first time unpleasant reality intrudes on a cherished (or, at least, firmly held) belief: I tried to ignore it or work around it.  That moment of intrusion, however, opened up the door and each time reality contradicted the Bible from then on I was more likely to look to see what reality had to say and attempt to understand what the real answers were.  It became, to borrow from Zacharias’s introduction to the idea, an attempt to come to a philosophical and existential understanding of the truth.  And that’s all because of the insistence that the Bible was accurate no matter what reality might have to say to the contrary.

But we’re not quite done.  No, siree.

Bruce Metzger, who’s a scholar from Princeton, made the comment, he said, “Take the twenty thousand lines of the New Testament.  It is safe for any scholar to say there is a 99.6% accuracy.”  No ancient document, none, has the kind of documentary support that the Bible has, over five thousand documents.” (5:54 in)

“Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything.  14% of people know that.” – Homer Simpson

I’m just going to lay this right out there for you: I have abso-fucking-loutely no clue what it means to say that the New Testament has a “99.6% accuracy.”  That might well be the most completely and totally meaningless statistic ever thrown out by anyone ever (and I’m sure that 56.2% of all people would agree with me on that one).  A cursory Google search just for “bible 99.6% accuracy” leads me to a lot of people who are either explicitly re-stating Zacharias’s quote or basically cribbing from it.

I believe I recall someone from back in the day asking me about this quote or one that’s similar.  At the time I recall saying that it was a load of BS.  And I’m going to keep saying it.  Even in the face of this handy-dandy chart put out by something called the Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry.  It’s just a list of historical documents followed by the year of the oldest copy of said document, the number of copies, and a percentage that indicates how accurate said documents are without giving any sense whatsoever of what methodology was used to reach that percentage.

But, basically, it seems to say that if we crunch all the numbers we can be 99.5% sure of being able to create an accurate rendition of the source documents of the New Testament.  There are several problems with this train of thought.

First, compare the four Gospels.  Each one tells a different story about Jesus and each one has a different conception of who Jesus was and what his message was.  Then compare the message of Jesus to the epistles of Paul.  You will get a different idea of who Jesus was and what his message was.  Then compare the epistles of Paul to the book of James.  You will get a still different idea.  And so on and so forth.

Then compare the world of the New Testament to the historical record.  There are plenty of discrepancies.  The big one is the whole bit with Caesar Augustus’s stupidly planned and carried out census of the whole world that required people to go back to their home village and was never actually called.  But there’s other stuff that I’m sure I’d love to get in to if I weren’t already 3,500 words in to this post that I wasn’t expecting to be anywhere close to this long.

So even if we can be 99.5% certain that the New Testament is an accurate copy of the New Testament of old based on manuscript evidence, we can’t be anywhere near that certain that the manuscripts themselves are reliable.  Moreover, the brute-force number crunching completely ignores the reality of the manuscript evidence.  Not all of them are complete.  Not all of them are in the same language.  Not all of them use the same words.  Not all of them put the stories in the same order.  So we can come up with a pretty damn good composite picture of the New Testament, but we cannot say that what we can come up with is anywhere close to 99.6% accurate.  And we can’t be at all sure that that composite manuscript actually reflects reality.

It’s basically an extremely convoluted way of lying with statistics.  But it also makes a compelling sounding case for the accuracy and believability of the Bible.  99.6% is, after all, a big number.  And it has a decimal point, which gives the illusion of hyper-accuracy.  So let’s break it down one last time.

Zacharias begins by claiming he’s making a simple, humble search for truth.  Then he claims that the Bible is the best (and, really, only) vehicle for truth.  To prove this he says that the Bible accurately predicted the future between 500 and 300 BCE.  He then extrapolates to say that if it did so once, it must have done so again.  He then concludes by saying we have a nearly unassailably accurate picture of what the New Testament actually looked like when written.

It sounds compelling, especially for someone who hasn’t researched the specific points that Zacharias brings up.  I’d hazard a guess that I’m in a pretty small minority on that one, so I’ll give anyone who has been taken in by that (including 18 year-old me) the benefit of the doubt.  And if you are sitting there without any research in front of you it’s hard to refute.  It has, in fact, taken me nearly four hours to write a post based on a seven minute YouTube video.  And I knew basically everything I was going to say about it going in.

The most important thing to consider, though, is this: the presentation is key.  Zacharias tells a story that sounds good because it’s specifically constructed to sound good.  He tells a story that sounds compelling because it’s specifically constructed to sound compelling.  But absent the construct, his arguments do not logically follow one from another.  To wit:

I am searching for truth, therefore I will consider the Bible.
The Bible accurately predicted a single event, therefore it could accurately predict all events.
The Old Testament can be read to predict Jesus, therefore it accurately predicted Jesus.
We have a shitload of old manuscripts of the New Testament, therefore we can believe everything in the New Testament.

These are four thoughts that don’t actually logically progress from each other.  It is, in fact, a prime example of what is known as sophistry, using subtly deceptive argumentation.  But you really have to know your shit and you really have to pay attention to catch all of it.  But the beauty of it is, since the entire point is to defend an all-or-nothing approach to the truth of the Bible, if you can show that it’s false, you can turn the arguments back on the apologist and disprove their use of the Bible.

Hiroshima

Every year on August 6th we’re reminded of a single, horrific event.  Every year we get a parade of internet articles about it.  Those internet articles then result in a discussion.  Generally the articles, at least the ones I see, explain how horrific that event was, explain that we should feel terrible about it, tell us that we should be ashamed of anything other than an abject admission that we should agree that everyone who was involved with that horrific event was a criminal, a terrorist, a horrible person.  Anyone who defends the actions taken on that day is, by definition, terrible.

A string of people who are against that event then come forward to say, “Yes, yes that event was terrible.  And yes, we agree that anyone who disagrees deserves to be tarred, feathered, and tossed out of polite society.”  Other people inevitably show up to say, “Wait, it’s not that simple.  There were extenuating circumstances.”  They then toss out statistics based on projections of events that never came to pass.  They add in other, sympathetic-sounding numbers that weren’t actually taken in to consideration by the people involved in the decision-making process.

This second group is dismissed, derided, sometimes in the crass lingo of the internet dismissed as “concern trolls,” since on the internet you have two options: agree with me or be dismissed as a sub-human individual.

No one learns anything.  No one comes to a point of agreement.  And next August 6th we’ll do it all over again, exactly the same way we did it today and we’ll do it next year.

It pisses me off to no end.

So let’s talk about August 6th, 1945.  Because it seems to be an imperative, anyway.

First of all, to the people who just blithely say, “We should never have done it and now history will judge us as terrorists,” I have exactly one thing to say:

Shut.  The.  Fuck.  Up.

And, yes, I realize that this means I’m telling PZ Myers to STFU.  I realize this means I’m telling the Slacktivist to STFU.  I realize that this means I’m telling a lot of people I probably otherwise agree with to STFU.

But, still, they need to shut the fuck up.

The entire anti-Hiroshima argument, at least as it gets discussed on the internet, is an argument without history, without understanding.  It’s based entirely on emotional response and Monday morning quarterbacking.  It is a judgment based on sixty-five years of second-guessing and terrible advancements in our capabilities of making war and understanding war.

To those people who come in and say, “But it saved millions of lives in the long-run.  Besides, they started it,” I have exactly one thing to say:

Shut.  The.  Fuck.  Up.

It’s an argument that is true enough, but it attempts to paint the people who made the decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima as humanitarians who cared about how many Japanese would die if there was an invasion of the Home Islands.  They didn’t.  And comparing Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima is a completely false equivalent.  Pearl Harbor was a purely military strike on a purely military harbor.  Hiroshima was a military strike on a primarily civilian target.

So now that everyone has shut the fuck up, let’s talk about atomic bombs.  Let’s talk about history.  Let’s talk about war.

We have this idea that wholesale war, or “total war,” as it’s called, was invented in 1864 by a man named William Tecumseh Sherman.  He was the man who unleashed his army to march from Atlanta to Savannah, taking what they needed and burning what they couldn’t carry in order to, as he said, “Make the South howl.”  It was, the people who make such decisions had decided, the only way to make sure the South knew there was no option other than surrender.

It was the terrible mathematics of war: if you can’t get your enemy soldiers and leadership to give up, convince the people to stop supporting their soldiers and leaders.  In America we pretend that this was some grand new thing because in America we have to pretend that we’re a special country with special ideas and special leaders.    We can pretend that civilians have gotten a free pass in war because American civilians have largely gotten free passes in war.  Other than the American Revolution and the War of 1812 it’s been Americans on other people’s soil killing their civilians alongside their soldiers.

Then there was the Civil War, where Americans killed other Americans.  We still use this as an excuse to be split.  The Confederate sympathizers among us get to pretend that William Tecumseh Sherman was a bloodthirsty, marauding barbarian from a foreign land so they don’t have to admit one thing: the people who suffered at the hands of Sherman’s March to the Sea brought it upon themselves.  Or, if they didn’t, they were victims of a selfish aristocracy that callously brought the violence of war to the peaceful lands of southern Georgia (also the Shenandoah Valley, but for some reason no one really talks about the fact that Phil Sheridan did basically the same thing there that Sherman did in Georgia).

For those who aren’t insulated by America’s great oceanic moat, however, there’s a different story to be told.  It was tradition in the medieval period when a besieging army broke down the doors of a city to have three days of rape, pillage, and destruction.  Any city that found itself surrounded by an army knew that it had two choices: surrender or face months (years, even) of deprivation, disease, and a final orgy of violence if it could not send its enemies away.

Civilians suffered on both ends.  Precious food was given to the defenders of the city first, as they needed to keep up their strength to man the walls.  And when the soldiers all fell and the gates were breached the civilians had their homes looted and their valuables taken.  The women were raped, then the ones who could fetch a good price at market were sold in to slavery.  It was not pretty.  But it was depressingly common.  And it was a practice engaged by all parties, be they Christian, Muslim, considered noble or base and depraved pirates.

Those who wish us to sit in abject acknowledgment of our horribleness as human beings because of the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki never seem to be aware of this fact.  Or if they are, they ignore it, pretend like it’s not an issue.  I believe that they want to pretend that brutality and barbarism in war is some sort of aberration, that those who went to war for the thousands of years between World War II and the time when the first chieftain assembled his men and gave them clubs only fought against those who deserved it, only killed and injured those who intended to be in the line of fire.

Civilians have never been insulated from war, however.  Everyone who goes to war makes war against the innocent as well as the guilty.  The only real difference between a medieval army and the crew of the Enola Gay is that the atomic bomb was capable of destroying more people in a moment than a medieval army could destroy in a month.

But in the empty, shattered streets of Hiroshima we see a microcosm of every single moment of brutality and barbarism that man has ever visited upon man from time immemorial.  But we don’t just have to look at Hiroshima.  The entirety of World War II was an orgasm of violence on a scale unimagined previously, even by those who had witnessed the corpse-filled trenches before Petersburg in Virginia or on the Western Front in France.

It started by accident, really.  A flight of bombers got lost over southern England and accidentally bombed a civilian airfield near London.  A few days later another group of bombers got lost and did the same thing.  The Fuhrer had ordered that no such attacks could take place except with his explicit permission.  The British retaliated with bombings in Berlin itself.  At the beginning of September, 1940 Hitler rescinded his order and the Luftwaffe began bombing London itself.

And do you know what RAF command did?  Do you?

They breathed a deep sigh of relief.  The RAF was barely hanging on.  A couple more weeks of bombings directed against RAF airfields and military installations may well have destroyed the RAF.  When the Germans began bombing London it was seen as a godsend by the powers that be in London.

Yeah.  Chew on that thought for a while.  The Royal goddamn Air Force was happy to see London get bombed because it meant they could continue fighting.  Besides, it gave all kinds of cover for what the British and Americans did to Germany for the rest of the war.

In February of 1945 a combined British and American bomber force basically wiped the city of Dresden off the map.  It’s quite literally one of the most senseless actions in the long, twisted history of senselessness in war.  The reason that Dresden was targeted was because there was quite literally nothing else for the Allies to target in Germany.  They didn’t even bother to target the military infrastructure on the outskirts of the city, either.  But, other than Kurt Vonnegut, no one seems to remember that one.

Of course one of the great victories in the Pacific Theater was the capture of Iwo Jima.  That was a great strategic boon for General Curtis LeMay, since it meant that the B-29 Superfortresses staging out of Saipan couldn’t be intercepted much outside of the Japanese Home Islands so they could drop their incendiary bombs directly on the Japanese cities without fear of reprisal.

Here’s the lesson of World War II: no one gave a shit about civilians.

It’s harsh, but there’s no other way around it.

See, strategic bombing was a blind alley in World War II.  The British didn’t surrender when bombs started falling on London during the Blitz.  The Germans didn’t surrender when literally hundreds of strategic bombers began pulverizing German cities with near-impunity on a daily basis.[1]

This is the harsh reality of World War II: we try to remember the Final Solution and the Holocaust as the great horror of World War II.  We try to remember the Allies as the great heroes, going in to save the world.  But America and Britain killed a fuckload of innocent people during World War II, too.  And they didn’t care.  It was war.

In this context the atomic bomb becomes something different.  It wasn’t deployed in a vacuum, where one day America was a noble, chivalrous nation with a lily-white soul and no blood on its hands and the next day it was the worst collection of murdering scum the world has ever seen.  The atomic bomb was simply the biggest damn weapon deployed in a war that was already completely insane and unrestrained.

Simply saying, “Americans are a bunch of terrorists,” or, “We should be disappointed to be a part of a country that did such a horrible thing,” completely misses the lessons of history and ignores what war is.[2]

I will never argue that the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima was absolutely necessary.  I will never even argue that it was right.  But it was justified.  This is the horrible logic of war.

The Japanese did some absolutely horrible things to the Chinese while carving out their Empire.  They were ruthless and implacable while they expanded through the Philippines and in to the South Pacific.  And it cannot be ignored that they were willing to get in to planes and fly in to warships just to defend their honor in a war that was long-since lost.  Hell, they invented a weapon called the Ohka that was a manned rocket designed to be dropped from a medium bomber, then flown in to a warship.  Pilots got one training run, then were deployed against attacking fleets.  Anyone who can train people to go out and kill themselves must be taken seriously as a foe.

It doesn’t help that the Japanese fed their people anti-American propaganda for years.  This isn’t anything special, as propaganda is a huge part of any war.  But by the time the Marines hit the beaches on Okinawa the Japanese civilians had been utterly convinced by their own government that the Americans would indiscriminately rape, torture, pillage, and kill anyone and everyone.  The Japanese people were prepared to fight to the death.

Until the atomic bombs fell from the sky.

The thing about it is that the power of the atomic bomb scared the shit out of everyone.  It’s speculation, but I fear for history if we hadn’t seen the atomic bomb first hand at, say, the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  We can’t say that it’s good that a lot of Japanese died on August 6th, 1945 because we might have blown up the world in October of 1962.  But the fact of the matter is that the reality of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki probably spared a lot of pain down the road.

One of the arguments I’ve seen basically goes like this: “Why didn’t America just drop a bomb on some island near Japan and say, ‘Look what we can do?’”

That’s simple: we’d already bombed the shit out of Germany and Japan.  A demonstration of the atomic bomb wouldn’t have had nearly the impact if it wasn’t in Japan itself.  And in the horrible, dreadful logic of war, that matters an awful lot.

There is a museum dedicated to the Pacific War in Admiral Chester Nimitz’s hometown of Fredricksburg, TX.  I went when I was down in Austin in June.

One room of the museum is dedicated to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  It’s a small, round room made claustrophobic by the presence of a replica of one of the bombs that takes up most of the floor space.

The walls are giant, photographic murals of the ruins of Nagasaki and Hiroshima after the atomic bombs were dropped and obliterated the cities.  After what we did to those cities.  The only sound in that room is wind.  Not a gentle breeze, though, that horrible, unmistakable wind that we’ve been conditioned as a society to recognize as the only sound in the silent world that comes after the apocalypse.

It is a rare thing in history to find a war monument to the horrible things done by the winning side.  It’s unheard of to see such a thing in the hometown of one of the great war heroes from that winning side.  Yet that’s exactly what that room is.

Walking in to that room I believe anyone with even a tiny amount of understanding would find it impossible to do anything other than stand in silence.

It’s a terrible thing, that power America unleashed against the unsuspecting Japanese on August 6th, 1945.  Calling it good is to permit all the horrid atrocities of war we’d be better off leaving behind.  But simply labeling it as terrorism cheapens what happened that day, diminishes it.

We have not thought about war the same since the bomb fell on Hiroshima.  America lost its innocence that day.  It took Vietnam and those iconic pictures of screaming children and civilians with guns pointed at their heads to make the moment personal.  But without Hiroshima we might have been able to pretend through Vietnam that we were only killing the people who deserved to be killed.

American civilians don’t know what it’s like to have the gun in their faces.  It took something as horrible as Hiroshima to force us to realize that war is a thing that shouldn’t be engaged in lightly.  But even so, we have not learned those lessons.  We don’t understand the terminology.  We don’t understand the importance.

Labeling Hiroshima an act of terrorism proves that point.  The “Collateral Murder” video and the completely idiotic reactions to it on both sides proved that point.  One side argued that American soldiers were intentionally and knowingly killing innocent and defenseless civilians without mercy or reflection while the other argued that we shouldn’t be allowed to see the realities of war.  It’s sheer, unadulterated idiocy on both sides.

So perhaps America as a whole should shut the fuck up.  Then maybe we should stop taking war in to everyone else’s backyard just because we think it’s a glorious and wonderful thing to do.

-----------------------------

[1]The flight paths the Americans and British took in to Germany in the last months of the war were called “the bomber stream.”  And that’s a descriptive phrase.  Around the time of the raid on Dresden the entire German air force could muster something less than 200 fighters to take on strategic bomber formations that contained four times the number of aircraft.  Plus escorts.  The Germans developed a sort of kamikaze tactic where they trained their aviators to get close enough to bombers to use their propellers as saws and chop the planes apart.

[2]And, of course, on the other side saying, “Damn Japs got what was coming to them,” doesn’t really help anything, either.  No one deserves to be nuked.

History Nerdiness Takes No Vacations, Part 9

The Battle of Dunkirk famously displayed the limitations of air power.  The Germans had the British Expeditionary Force pushed against the North Sea.  Rather than ordering the army to destroy the British to the man, Hitler allowed Goering to attempt to destroy the British using the Luftwaffe.

He failed.  Some 340,000 troops escaped from the continent, possibly saving the war for England in the early days.[1]  But the failure at Dunkirk should not have been taken as a failure of air power as a whole.

The fall of France put Britain in a bind.  Everyone who has some knowledge of World War II has at least a passing knowledge of the Battle of Britain and the privations placed upon the British citizenry over the course of the bombing campaign.  But there was a much larger strategic difficulty in play that few people mention.

The fall of France meant that Britain could no longer rely on the French Navy to contain the Italian Regia Marina.  The Regia Marina sat astride the British supply lines that stretched the breadth of the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to the all-important bases surrounding the Suez Canal in Egypt.  Italy’s main fleet, based at Taranto in the heel of the Italian peninsula, simply had to be there to cause problems.

This is a concept known as a “fleet in being.”  The general idea of the fleet in being is that a relatively weak fleet can deny the use of the sea and tie down enemy forces without ever having to engage in battle and risk destruction.  No better example of a fleet in being can be found than the German High Seas Fleet in the First World War.  The High Seas Fleet rarely left port, spent the vast majority of the war boxed up in Wilhelmshaven, and yet managed to deny the North Sea to the British and forced the Grand Fleet to remain at Scapa Flow, rather than attempt to engage in any adventurism away from northern Europe.

During World War II the Axis powers in Europe operated their surface navies primarily as fleets in being.  The pocket battleships, along with the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, regularly sortied, forcing the British to divert precious naval resources to track them.  The pocket battleship Graf Spee was an excellent example of this.  In the weeks preceding the Battle of the River Plate and Graf Spee’s subsequent scuttling, the British had nine different ship groups specifically hunting Graf Spee, including four aircraft carriers, three battleships, and two battlecruisers.

As long as the Regia Marina had a powerful fleet in the port of Taranto, the British were in trouble.  The Royal Navy could have taken on the entire Regia Marina and the entire Kreigsmarine in open battle.  But there was to be no Trafalgar.  There wasn’t even to be a Jutland.

The idea of assaulting Taranto directly was out the window, too.  One of the key aspects of the fleet in being is the simple idea that the fleet in port is relatively safe from opposing warships.  Throughout history this had been more-or-less true.  An enemy generally had to take a port in order to reach the ships berthed therein.

But the British Mediterranean Fleet had something that no previous naval commander had been able to claim: airplanes.  Specifically, Admiral Andrew B. Cunningham[2] had a force of 21 obsolescent Fairey Swordfish attack biplanes using specially modified air-dropped torpedoes.  On the night of November 11-12, 1940, the Swordfish of the Mediterranean Fleet attacked Taranto.  When the dust settled, the Littorio and Caio Duilio were heavily damaged and the Conte di Cavour had been sunk.

Taranto did not destroy the Regia Marina, but it did mean that the fleet was diminished for the Battle of Spartivento later that month and Cape Matapan in March of 1941.  While not decisive in and of itself, the Battle of Taranto had lasting repercussions in the Mediterranean.  The results were also studied with much interest by Japanese military planners on the other side of the world.  But the next move still went to the British.

In the spring of 1941 the battleship Bismarck attempted to break out in to the Atlantic Ocean.  The British could not have that.  The first ships to engage Bismarck were the HMS Hood, the Royal Navy’s pride, and HMS Prince of Wales, the newest of the King George V-class of battleships on the morning of May 26th.  The first battle did not go so well for the British.  Hood was sunk, Prince of Wales forced to retire.  The Bismarck broke out in to the Atlantic.

That evening several Swordfish bombers from the HMS Victorious hit Bismarck, opening wounds quickly repaired after the battle with Hood and Prince of Wales.  Bismarck was forced to slow to 16 knots.  On the 26th Swordfish launched from the Ark Royal again hit Bismarck, jamming the battleship’s rudder.  The great battleship was now effectively unmaneuverable.  It was only a matter of time before the ship would be destroyed.

On the morning of May 27th the King George V and the Rodney closed on Bismarck, accompanied by the heavy cruisers Norfolk and Dorsetshire.  Bismarck was ultimately sunk the traditional way.  But it’s entirely possible that the sinking would not have happened were it not for carrier-launched aircraft.

On December 7th, 1941 the demonstration of the strategic use of air power moved out of British hands.  The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.  Where the British had launched 21 aircraft from two relatively small aircraft carriers against Taranto, the Japanese launched nearly twenty times that many from six large fleet carriers.[3]  We all know what happened on December 7th.

Less well known, however, is what happened three days later off the coast of Malaya.  The British dispatched the battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulse to the Pacific to show the flag and “overawe” the Japanese.  This force, known as Force Z, was also supposed to include the new carrier HMS Indomitable, but that ship had run aground.

One of the most expensive things to provide is an object lesson.  Force Z provided an unexpected one when the Japanese jumped the fleet and sunk it.  No Japanese surface ships were involved in the engagement at all.

Over the course of three days the Japanese effectively swept the Pacific of all Anglo-American battleships without firing a single gun from a ship of their own.  Admiral Yamamoto, architect of the attack on Pearl Harbor, did not necessarily see this as reason to celebrate.  He would prophetically declare that the attack on Pearl Harbor had awakened “a sleeping giant.”

But Yamamoto had done far more than that.  In removing the battleship fleet in Pearl Harbor from the US Navy’s short-term planning, Yamamoto ushered in the next evolution in naval combat.  Three American Pacific capital ships weren’t in Pearl Harbor that Sunday morning: the Enterprise, Lexington, and Saratoga.  When the United States struck back it wasn’t with 16” guns fired at a range of 20 miles.  It was with torpedoes and bombs dropped from aircraft.

The story of the Pacific war is one of aircraft carriers.  The iconic early war battles: Coral Sea and Midway were fought at aircraft range, not gun range.  The Japanese superbattleship Musashi was sunk by aircraft during the Battle of Leyte Gulf.  One of the most lopsided battles in the Pacific war pitted a tiny force of four American escort carriers, two destroyers, and four destroyer escorts known as Taffy 3 against a Japanese force consisting of Yamato, Nagato, Kongo, Haruna, and escorts.  Taffy 3 won the day due to a combination of heroism, luck, and the ability of the force’s aircraft to harass the Japanese to the point of distraction with no worries about Japanese aircraft.[4]  Yamato was sunk by airplanes without ever reaching its final objective of beaching itself on the shores of Okinawa and destroying the invasion fleet.

There were, in fact, only two battleship engagements during the Pacific War.  In November of 1942 the battleships South Dakota and Washington engaged the Kirishima in a night engagement during the Guadalcanal campaign. Kirishima did not survive the battle.  During the Battle of Leyte Gulf the old battleships of Jesse Oldendorf’s detachment blocked the end of the Suriago Strait against the Japanese Southern Force.  Oldendorf’s command included the West Virginia, Maryland, Tennessee, California, and Pennsylvania, which had been salvaged from the wreckage of Pearl Harbor, as well as the Mississippi, which had been on the East Coast at the time.  The Japanese force included the Yamashiro and the Fuso.  But the Fuso had already been destroyed by torpedoes by the time the American battleships were even in range, so the last battleship combat in history was a 6:1 drubbing.

It’s fitting, I suppose, that the final battleship-to-battleship battle in history was an affair between obsolete warships of a previous generation.  The battleship was an anachronism by the end of the Second World War.

The final generation of battleships launched were the magnificent fast battleships, most notably the American Iowa-class ships.[5]  But this last generation of ships wasn’t valued for their main guns as much as they were for their huge AA batteries and their ability to keep up with fleet carriers.  No ship in the world could carry as much anti-aircraft weaponry as a battleship, so as a final line of defense they were invaluable, especially when the increasingly desperate Japanese began the kamikaze attacks as the war drew to its inevitable conclusion.

After World War II the battleship stuck around for a while.  It was still a prestige weapon and a potential deterrent.  At various times between the end of World War II and Desert Storm the Iowas were pulled out of retirement, renovated, and put back on the battle line.  But it wasn’t enemy battleships they were tasked with engaging.

In the Korean War, then again in Vietnam and, finally, in Desert Storm the Iowas (all but Missouri in Korea, the New Jersey in Vietnam, and Missouri and Wisconsin for Desert Storm) were brought to the line for their unparalleled ability to attack ground emplacements.  Those giant 16” guns have an impact that few other conventional weapons can claim.  They also possess an ability to loiter within range of a target that aircraft simply do not.  When combined with newer weapons, like Tomahawk cruise missile launchers, they were still terrifying weapons.

But maintaining battleships on the off chance they’ll be needed to shell enemy land installations is an investment with a very low rate of return.  So even the last of the battleships have been sent off to their final duty as museum ships.[6]

Mikasa, Yokosuka, Japan:

USS Texas, Houston, TX:

USS North Carolina, Wilmington, NC:

USS Alabama, Mobile, AL:

USS Massachusetts, Fall River, MA:

USS Iowa, US Navy Reserve fleet, Suisun Bay, CA:

USS New Jersey, Camden, NJ:

USS Missouri, Pearl Harbor, HI:

USS Wisconsin, Norfolk, VA:

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[1]Goering made the same mistake again in North Africa.  The British held Malta, an island that sat directly between the tip of Italy and the North African coast.  Planes and ships sortied from Malta, cutting off the majority of supplies bound for the Afrika Korps.  Goering decided that Malta would capitulate under massive air assault.  It didn’t.  Goering: not too bright.

For a practically inhospitable rock, Malta played a pivotal role in the Mediterranean on many occasions.  The Knights of St. John (also known as the Knights Hospitaller) held the line against the onrushing Ottoman Empire during the critical century and a half between the fall of Constantinople and the Battle of Lepanto.  The simple accident of geography that put Malta in the middle of the narrowest passage between Italy and North Africa made the island far more important than it should have been.

[2]Nicknamed “ABC.”

[3]There’s a difference in naval theory to be seen here.  Britain, engaged as it was in the relatively confined spaces of the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean, didn’t see a need for large aircraft carriers.  The United States saw the aircraft carrier as a key way to project power across vast distances.  At the outset of World War II the biggest British carrier was Ark Royal, which carried 70 planes.  The rest of the British carriers had 50 or fewer aircraft.  The American Yorktowns and Lexingtons carried 90 aircraft.  Only the Ranger and Wasp had aircraft complements in the mid-70s.  Ranger was the first purpose-built American aircraft carrier and Wasp was a somewhat successful attempt to scale the 20,000-ton Yorktown-class carriers down to 15,000 tons to squeeze one more carrier out under the Washington Treaty tonnage limits.

[4]James Hornfischer’s Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors.  Read it.

[5]The last battleship ever built was the HMS Vanguard, which was launched after the end of the war and scrapped in 1960.  Vanguard was the largest British battleship ever built, but was still only roughly on par with the Iowas, possessing a main armament of 8 15” guns.

[6]Although the USS Iowa is still looking for a home as of the last time I heard.

History Nerdiness Takes No Vacations, Part 8

As the world rushed towards its second great war in a generation all of the talk was about battleships. Of course those who were talking about land war were also talking about the Maginot Line.

Germany had frightened the world by basically shirking the ship building limits imposed upon it by the Treaty of Versailles. At the tail-end of the ‘20s they began construction of the Deutschland, followed shortly by the Admiral Graf Spee and the Admiral Scheer. The three ships were supposed to match a 10,000 ton limit that allowed Germany a costal defense fleet. In reality the ships were about one-third above the limit in order to allow the mounting of a pair of triple 11” turrets. The German Navy defined them as “panzerschiffe” at first, but later redesignated them heavy cruisers.

The British called them “pocket battleships.”

In truth, other than the bit where they had an 11” main battery, the pocket battleships were nothing close to a battleship. By way of comparison, the Northampton-class heavy cruisers, the US Navy’s workhorses in the Pacific, were actually 3,000 tons lighter, armed with nine 8” guns, 1 more torpedo tube, a better AA suite, and were four knots faster. Both classes of ships were similarly protected, but the only place where the pocket battleships were absolutely better was in their secondary armament. But against a real battleship or a competently handled battlecruiser it would not have mattered at all.

Germany’s next attempt was much better. Had the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau[1] been deployed at the Battle of Jutland they would have been the best ships in the engagement by a significant margin. The only reason they weren’t considered more powerful is because they were only armed with 11” main guns, a weapon that simply wasn’t to be fully respected in a world of 16” guns. The Bismarck and Tirpitz, however, with their eight 15” guns and 30 knot top speed were forces to be reckoned with. They were bigger, faster, and carried bigger guns and more armor than the British King George V-class (although the British ships had 10 14” guns, so the difference may well have been moot). The main belt on the German ships was slightly inferior, but that’s because the Germans never adopted the all-or-nothing design scheme of the American and British naval architecture at the time.

The Germans only managed to build the two super battleships of the Bismarck-class. The plan was for five, to be followed by the so-called H-class, ships ranging in the 60,000 ton, 16” gun range. When war broke out in 1939 the actual build plan was scrapped, but planning and refinement continued, until the point where the design for the ships ballooned to over 100,000 tons.  This is why engineers and architects should be kept constantly busy with actual projects.

In point of fact, the British Royal Navy that went in to WWII was not the Royal Navy that entered WWI. England went to war with all of seven post-WWI battleships in 1939: the four King George Vs, the two Nelsons[3], and the Hood. Other than that, Britain had the two Renown-class battlecruisers, the five Revenge-class battleships, and the four Queen Elizabeths. All had been upgraded between wars, but not to nearly the same degree as, say, the USS Texas, as the British felt an acute need to show the flag at their overseas outposts while the rest of the world’s navies had the luxury of laying their battle squadrons up for long periods of time. Either way, the British Navy of 1939 actually had fewer battleships and battlecruisers than the German High Seas Fleet deployed at Jutland.

Of course, the Kreigsmarine was no High Seas Fleet. Had all of Hitler’s plans come to fruition there might have been more of a problem. But Britain’s plan was to basically turn the Mediterranean over to the French and concentrate on the North Sea, Atlantic, and countering the Japanese in the Pacific if necessary. But, of course, if the “if necessary” came along, there was a good chance the US Navy would be involved, too.

The Regia Marina, meanwhile, was a fairly formidable force that stood a good chance of fulfilling Mussolini’s plans to take the Mediterranean back as a “Roman lake.” She went in to WWII with four WWI-era battleships: the two surviving Conte de Cavours and the two Andrea Dorias. But construction on the Vittorio Venetos began in 1935. Three of the four were completed by 1942. The Vittorio Venetos were magnificent warships, armed with nine 16” guns and capable of steaming at 28 knots. They were a match for any contemporary British, French, or American design.

The French went to WWII with five WWI-era battleships: two of the Courbets and the three Bretagnes[4]. They also built four modern battleships: the two Dunkerques and the two Richelieus. These were awkward designs, in that their entire main battery was mounted in a pair of forward quadruple turrets. But the classes were capable of 31 and 32 knots, respectively, well armored, and enough to hold the Italians in place in the Mediterranean, which was really all the British asked of them.

The real story was out in the Pacific, though. The Japanese had built a battlefleet under the theory that they’d draw the American fleet to a battle of annihilation. Between the wars they’d modernized the Nagatos and Kongos and done some work on the Yamashiros, but basically left the latter class as slow relics of a former age. Japan, in fact, only completed two battleships as battleships between the wars.

But what battleships they were. The Yamato and Musashi were the largest warships in the world by a wide margin, weighing in at 69,000 tons, mounting nine 18.1” main guns, and basically impervious to anything fired from a smaller caliber weapon. The two ships were completed in near complete secrecy. Until the end of the war American intelligence thought they were similar in size and scale to the Iowa-class ships, which displaced better than 20,000 tons less. The only person outside of Japan who really knew what was up was a German official, who toured the Yamato’s construction site and – even without being given any specifics – was able to come up with a remarkably astute guess as to the ship’s massive dimensions. He, of course, wasn’t interested in sharing his insights with the US Navy.

On the other side of the Pacific, the US Navy had a powerful battleship force, but it was significantly slower and possessed nothing remotely close to capable of standing up to the battleships Yamato or Musashi. I’ve spent more time than is probably healthy considering this issue and I’m reasonably certain that a US Navy with the full complement of WWII battleships, including all four Iowas, all four South Dakotas, and both North Carolinas – backed up by at least two, if not four, of the older battleships – could have stood up to a battle squadron consisting of the two Yamatos, two Nagatos, and four Kongos. If the Japanese had deployed their “obsolete” battleships (which were still at least on par with the battleships at Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941), I would want the entire Pacific squadron.

But the Imperial Japanese Navy had been working on a weapon that was at least as important as their terrifyingly huge battleships. One of the biggest problems they had in their war with China was projecting power inland. Their carrier-based aircraft simply did not have the ability to get far enough to be effective.

So the Japanese took a novel approach. They built light, fast, maneuverable aircraft with exceedingly long range. Thus were the A6M Zero fighter and the D3A Val dive bomber born.

These two weapons would have a far greater impact on the world the battleships that held center stage in the run-up to World War II. But the reasons for that shall have to be held for the next (and, hopefully, last) post in this series.

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[1]Having mentioned the Graf Spee, Scharnhorst, and Gneisenau, I figure now is a good time to point out one of the most underrated aspects of German strategy in World War I. When war broke out the British Home Fleet had the German High Seas Fleet bottled up in its North Sea port. Germany knew that the British were dependent on their empire to survive, so they had to find some way to strike at British shipping and threaten the British colonies. The solution was to make use of a scattered collection of German cruisers to interdict British shipping. Vice Admiral Maximillian Graf von Spee was in the Indian Ocean in charge of a five cruiser detachment, consisting of the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Nurnberg, Leipzeig, and Emden.[2] He left Emden in the Indian Ocean, where it wrecked British shipping for three months and even shelled the port of Madras. Sixty British, Australian, and Japanese warships were eventually involved in the search for Emden.

[2]Based at the German colony of Tsingtao in China. The Germans being, well, Germans, they brewed beer. This is why Tsingtao beer is one of the best-known Asian beers. These are the connections you learn to draw when you spend a lot of time doing history and drinking.

[3]Which were extremely awkward-looking compromise ships. They were originally a 48,000 ton design re-imagined to fit under the 35,000 ton Washington Treaty limits. As such, they mounted all three of their triple 16” gun turrets forward to reduce the necessary length of armor. Although they turned out to be fine, seaworthy ships, the awkward pair were never loved and often mocked. Compared to the American treaty battleships, the comparably sized North Carolina and South Dakota-class, the Nelsons are just damned ugly. They British ships were also slower and slightly less well protected, although this says far more about the quality of technology in 1937 compared to 1927 than it does about British design capabilities.

To wit, the HMS Nelson:

The USS North Carolina:

And the USS Indiana:

[4]The Greeks had actually ordered one that was never completed. It was to be named Basileus Konstantinos, which means “Emperor Constantine.” I think that’s neat. “Basileus” has an interesting etymology. It was originally a Mycenaean-era word that basically meant “warlord.” It later came to mean “king,” although in classical Greece it wasn’t actually used by authoritarian rulers, who were, instead, tyrants (no, really. While that term exclusively means “horrible totalitarian” these days, its original use was to denote a leader who was given control of a city during times of great distress. That distress, meanwhile, when caused by rebellion and chaos, was known as “stasis,” a word that basically means the exact opposite of chaos in modern English. Language. It’s a funny thing...). The symbol of the increasing Greecification of the Eastern Roman Empire after Constantine was when the Emperor stopped being referred to by the traditional Latin “Rex” and was, instead, called “Basileus.”

These days we still use a descendant of the word on a regular basis: “boss.” Also, just because I can, the first two Roman Emperors gave their names to the highest titles of the Roman Empire: “Caesar” and “Augustus.” During the fragmentation of the Empire the head ruler was “Augustus,” while the subordinate was “Caesar.” The term “Caesar” was carried forward and transformed in to “Tsar” to refer to the king Russia and “Kaiser” to refer to the king of Germany.

Also, seriously, if I were a history teacher or professor I’d totally be one of those guys who just went in to random, tangential stories at a moment’s notice. Although, really, I think that’s something that all good teachers of history have in common. The more you learn and the more you care to learn the more you see the random points of interconnection between otherwise completely unrelated things. So we have Chinese beer because of German imperialism (and Japanese beer because of Dutch trading and American imperialism…) and the Greek Navy ordering a battleship named after a Roman Emperor (although, to be fair, there were a lot of Emperor Constantines in Byzantine history, with the terminal Constantine being Constantine XI Palaeologus, who lost the city to Mehmet II. But when the modern state of Greece was formed as a monarchy there were two more Constantines, who were numbered as XII and XIII.