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Correcting four myths about the history of the Crusades

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Here is an interesting article from Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

Intro:

The verdict seems unanimous. From presidential speeches to role-playing games, the crusades are depicted as a deplorably violent episode in which thuggish Westerners trundled off, unprovoked, to murder and pillage peace-loving, sophisticated Muslims, laying down patterns of outrageous oppression that would be repeated throughout subsequent history. In many corners of the Western world today, this view is too commonplace and apparently obvious even to be challenged.

But unanimity is not a guarantee of accuracy. What everyone “knows” about the crusades may not, in fact, be true. From the many popular notions about the crusades, let us pick four and see if they bear close examination.

The four myths:

  • Myth #1: The crusades represented an unprovoked attack by Western Christians on the Muslim world.
  • Myth #2: Western Christians went on crusade because their greed led them to plunder Muslims in order to get rich.
  • Myth #3: Crusaders were a cynical lot who did not really believe their own religious propaganda; rather, they had ulterior, materialistic motives.
  • Myth #4: The crusades taught Muslims to hate and attack Christians.

Here’s the most obvious thing you should know. The Crusades were defensive actions:

In a.d. 632, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, North Africa, Spain, France, Italy, and the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica were all Christian territories. Inside the boundaries of the Roman Empire, which was still fully functional in the eastern Mediterranean, orthodox Christianity was the official, and overwhelmingly majority, religion. Outside those boundaries were other large Christian communities—not necessarily orthodox and Catholic, but still Christian. Most of the Christian population of Persia, for example, was Nestorian. Certainly there were many Christian communities in Arabia.

By a.d. 732, a century later, Christians had lost Egypt, Palestine, Syria, North Africa, Spain, most of Asia Minor, and southern France. Italy and her associated islands were under threat, and the islands would come under Muslim rule in the next century. The Christian communities of Arabia were entirely destroyed in or shortly after 633, when Jews and Christians alike were expelled from the peninsula.6 Those in Persia were under severe pressure. Two-thirds of the formerly Roman Christian world was now ruled by Muslims.

What had happened? Most people actually know the answer, if pressed—though for some reason they do not usually connect the answer with the crusades. The answer is the rise of Islam. Every one of the listed regions was taken, within the space of a hundred years, from Christian control by violence, in the course of military campaigns deliberately designed to expand Muslim territory at the expense of Islam’s neighbors. Nor did this conclude Islam’s program of conquest. The attacks continued, punctuated from time to time by Christian attempts to push back. Charlemagne blocked the Muslim advance in far western Europe in about a.d. 800, but Islamic forces simply shifted their focus and began to island-hop across from North Africa toward Italy and the French coast, attacking the Italian mainland by 837. A confused struggle for control of southern and central Italy continued for the rest of the ninth century and into the tenth. In the hundred years between 850 and 950, Benedictine monks were driven out of ancient monasteries, the Papal States were overrun, and Muslim pirate bases were established along the coast of northern Italy and southern France, from which attacks on the deep inland were launched. Desperate to protect victimized Christians, popes became involved in the tenth and early eleventh centuries in directing the defense of the territory around them.

If you asked me what are the two best books on the Crusades, I would answer God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades by Baylor professor Rodney Stark and The Concise History of the Crusades by Professor Thomas F. Madden. If you get this question a lot from atheists, then I recommend you pick these up. Anything by Rodney Stark is useful for Christians, in fact.

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How do “conservative” women like Tomi Lahren explain the decline of marriage?

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Recently, “conservative” Tomi Lahren has appeared on shows like Piers Morgan and Laura Ingraham, arguing that men are defective, weak, and lazy. She thinks that the deficiencies of men are the reason for the decline of marriage. Women want to get married, but the men are just so inferior that women cannot find any “real men”. And that’s why marriage is declining.

But are her views accurate? Is the decline of marriage really due to a shortage of high quality men?

First of all, it’s important to point out that women’s views of what a good man is have been changing. For one thing, a “good man” is now a man who embraces leftist policies like abortion, same-sex marriage, student loan bailouts, green new deal socialism, government-run healthcare, defund the police, open borders, transing the kids, etc.

The far-left UK Independent explains:

An analysis of survey data from across the developing world had found that “a new global gender divide” is emerging. The analysis, conducted by the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch, showed that the developed world’s young women have rapidly become more liberal. Young men, however, have either become more conservative (as in the US) or been much slower to become more progressive (as in the UK). Gen Z, Burn-Murdoch concluded, is “two generations, not one.”

Today, young, unmarried women are more likely to support abortion and same-sex marriage than young, unmarried men. And it’s not just moral issues, it’s fiscal issues as well. Young unmarried women generally vote against the policies that make a country prosperous, such as low taxes and small government.

This study from the Journal of Political Economy explains:

This paper examines the growth of government during this century as a result of giving women the right to vote. Using cross‐sectional time‐series data for 1870–1940, we examine state government expenditures and revenue as well as voting by U.S. House and Senate state delegations and the passage of a wide range of different state laws. Suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue and more liberal voting patterns for federal representatives, and these effects continued growing over time as more women took advantage of the franchise. Contrary to many recent suggestions, the gender gap is not something that has arisen since the 1970s, and it helps explain why American government started growing when it did.

Now, if you think that Christian leaders are opposed to this slide to the left among young women, then you are wrong. Christian leaders have embraced a view called “servant leadership”. And that view is simply that men are not supposed to lead on moral and spiritual issues, like telling the truth, making decisions, making plans, and achieving results. If men say anything that upsets non-Christians, then this is BAD, and the man has to be punished.

The new view of male leadership which is shared by Christian and non-Christian feminists is that men’s primary purpose is not to serve God, but women. Men are not there to confront lies and immorality in the culture, because “don’t judge”. Men are only there to “provide” (dispense money) and “protect” (be tall, and make muscles). Men should not expect their wives to stay home with their young children. Men must not expect their wives to homeschool the children. Men must drop off the kids at day care and public school, and pick them up. This allows men’s wives to be free to pursue their feminist goals – like buying expensive clothes, putting on make-up and going on TV, just like Tomi Lahren does.

So, how do traditional men respond to this assessment of the decline of marriage?

Here is a clip from Matt Walsh, where he explains what he thinks is wrong with Tomi Lahren’s view:

And then here’s another clip from Steven Crowder, where he explains why feminists (non-Christian and Christian) have failed to be convincing to young men:

Finally, a note. Tomi Lahren is not a conservative. Like most childless, career-oriented feminists, she’s pro-abortion. In fact, if she is like most Christian leaders, she doesn’t think that women sin by choosing abortion. It is somehow always a man’s fault when women sin, because women were not affected by The Fall.

Where are all the good men?

What about Tomi’s definition of “good men”? When modern women talk about “where are all the good men?”, they don’t mean men who are good at defeating lies and opposing moral evil. They don’t mean Matt Walsh. Conservative, Christian men “give them the ick”.

By “good men”, they mean men who:

  • are tall and have muscles
  • display wealth, rather than save it
  • dispense lots of cash to women on demand
  • put their kids in daycare and public schools
  • vote for Democrat policies, e.g. – abortion, green new deal socialism, defunding police, open borders, transing kids, etc.
  • don’t judge, especially don’t judge the woman’s past

Those are the “good men” that modern feminists are having so much trouble finding in their 30s and 40s, once they get tired of having “fun”, and want to settle down with a stable, boring ATM who agrees with them on secular leftism, and NEVER imposes any responsibilities or obligations on them. “Servant leadership”!

So, should traditional men wife up non-traditional women like Tomi Lahren? No. Traditional men should only get married to traditional women. Non-traditional women have to get married to non-traditional men.

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What is the earliest statement of the authoritative books of the Bible?

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I know that in the land of secular leftism, there are many myths, and those myths survive because they circulate in an echo chamber. But this is the Wintery Knight blog, and on this blog, we go back to the evidence. So what’s the myth? “The list of authoritative books of the Bible was determined hundreds of years after they were written”. Is that true? Let’s take a look at the data and see.

So, the allegation is that before 325 AD, people were using the canonical gospels equally with the forgery gospels like Judas, Peter, Mary, Thomas, etc. Then there was a church council that whittled down that list of equally valid sources to just the 4 gospels we recognize today. But did it really happen like that?

So, before we look to a scholar, I want to take a stab at this, and say what I would say if someone asked me this question. So, the first thing that came into my mind is that you don’t need a church council to tell you which books of the Bible are authoritative, you just have to look at which books the earliest church fathers are quoting. And they are quoting the gospels.

Here is a snip from a conversation between Frank Turek and J. Warner Wallace, and here’s what Wallace says:

So, I write in this new book, Person of Interest, I reached out to David now that Norm has passed, and he had some great people who he was working with on this, and I cited them in the case notes of this book. And you can see it in the book. It’s illustrated. Every church father who precedes the Council of Nicaea, and how many books, how many gospels, and how many letters are quoted by that particular church father. There’s a graphic for this, and you can see them all standing with the numbers of gospels they quote, and the numbers of letters they quote. And then I went through, I did the research, and he has compiled numbers. David and his associates have compiled numbers on how many…so this is a much more accurate. So, here’s what we know. And this is what I talked about in the book. It turns out that about 87% of the Gospel of Matthew is quoted by the early church fathers prior to the Council of Nicaea. About 935 verses. 66% of Mark, about 435 verses are quoted by these same church leaders. But 86% of the Gospel of Luke, 990 verses quoted by these church leaders. And 97% of the Gospel of John, about 859 verses that are quoted by these early church fathers.

So, if you go by that standard of who are the early church fathers quoting, it’s the 4 canonical gospels. And by the way, if you are looking for specific reasons why some “gospels” were not included, I would look at the Michael Licona chapters of Lee Strobel’s “The Case for the Real Jesus”. And there is an audio book!

But I also found this article over at Canon Fodder (Michael Kruger’s blog), that had more.

He writes:

First, we don’t measure the existence of the New Testament just by the existence of lists. When we examine the way certain books were used by the early church fathers, it is evident that there was a functioning canon long before the fourth century.  Indeed, by the second century, there is already a “core” collection of New Testament books functioning as Scripture.

Second, there are reasons to think that Athanasius’ list is not the earliest complete list we possess. In the festschrift for Larry Hurtado, Mark Manuscripts and Monotheism (edited by Chris Keith and Dieter Roth; T&T Clark, 2015), I wrote an article entitled, “Origen’s List of New Testament Books in Homiliae on Josuam 7.1: A Fresh Look.”

In that article, I argue that around 250 A.D., Origen likely produced a complete list of all 27 New Testament books–more than a hundred years before Athanasius. In his typical allegorical fashion, Origen used the story of Joshua to describe the New Testament canon:

But when our Lord Jesus Christ comes, whose arrival that prior son of Nun designated, he sends priests, his apostles, bearing “trumpets hammered thin,” the magnificent and heavenly instruction of proclamation. Matthew first sounded the priestly trumpet in his Gospel; Mark also; Luke and John each played their own priestly trumpets. Even Peter cries out with trumpets in two of his epistles; also James and Jude. In addition, John also sounds the trumpet through his epistles [and Revelation], and Luke, as he describes the Acts of the Apostles. And now that last one comes, the one who said, “I think God displays us apostles last,” and in fourteen of his epistles, thundering with trumpets, he casts down the walls of Jericho and all the devices of idolatry and dogmas of philosophers, all the way to the foundations (Hom. Jos. 7.1).

As one can see from the list above, all 27 books of the New Testament are accounted for (Origen clearly counts Hebrews as part of Paul’s letters). The only ambiguity is a text-critical issue with Revelation, but we have good evidence from other sources that Origen accepted Revelation as Scripture (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 6.25.10).

So, if you ever hear someone saying that the authoritative books of the Bible were not decided until the 4th century, then there are a couple of ideas of how to respond to that.