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100%. Unfortunately, rather than rebut the substance of your argument, people are voting you down (and the same for my own similar comment). It is convenient for certain parts of the US right (Fox and also Musk come to mind) to present a narrative about the UK which distracts from the actual hard realities of recent events in the US itself.


As a Brit, I find it very hard to believe that the majority of comments in this thread are not either written out of ignorance or are bots.

The article is from an anarchist organisation and sensationalist. 'Precrime' in the sense described is performed routinely by all intelligence agencies and police networks in the West.

Criticisms from across the pond reflect a spectacular lack of perspective. The UK is far more free than the US - a country with a fascist leader, ICE thugs who go about masked with guns and shoot to kill US citizens apparently with the full endorsement of the US President, a weaponised justice system that can target the chairman of the federal bank and strip a military Senator of his pension and rank simply for what he says (so much for 'free speech!'), and levels of inequality and centralised wealth and political funding that undermine democracy.


> As a Brit, I find it very hard to believe that the majority of comments in this thread are not either written out of ignorance or are bots.

I am a Brit and I object to a lot of the expansion of powers that have happened in Britain during successive governments since the "War on Terror" started which was pretty might right after 9/11. I would like to see much of this legislation repealed. However that is unlikely to happen.

> The article is from an anarchist organisation and sensationalist

Why does it matter if they are a anarchist organisation or not?

As for sensationalist, possibly. But they seem to highlight genuine concerns that have been raised by other organisations.

> The UK is far more free than the US - a country with a fascist leader, ICE thugs who go about masked with guns and shoot to kill US citizens apparently with the full endorsement of the US President, a weaponised justice system that can target the chairman of the federal bank and strip a military Senator of his pension and rank simply for what he says (so much for 'free speech!'), and levels of inequality and centralised wealth and political funding that undermine democracy.

All you are doing in this speil is repeating talking points found on the news sites. I find this sort of stuff tiresome to read. I don't care about what happens in the US generally. It is literally on the other side of an ocean. I do care about the OSA, I do care about Digital ID, I do care about the expansion of government powers that I believe are unjustified.


I completely agree with criticism of expansion of government powers in some contexts but my original point was about gaining perspective and avoiding sensationalism, which I argue the article and many comments here fall into.

> Why does it matter if they are a anarchist organisation or not?

'Freedom' and government authority coexist to some extent (tax is an imposition for example, but funds a military which should ensure ongoing freedom, etc.). The article needs to be read on its own merits of course but the organisation who provide it adhere to a different value judgement about where the balance of authority and anarchy should lie in society than most would agree with. That's a helpful data point I think, even if only a small part of the story.

> I do care about the OSA, I do care about Digital ID, I do care about the expansion of government powers that I believe are unjustified.

You'll be relieved to see that the compulsory element of Digital ID (for work) has been removed at least (reported widely in press outlets yesterday evening).


> I completely agree with criticism of expansion of government powers in some contexts but my original point was about gaining perspective and avoiding sensationalism, which I argue the article and many comments here fall into.

Yet you were engaging in your own brand of it by repeating US news output, which quite honestly is always sensationalist.

Look I didn't like seeing that footage where the woman got shot.But it isn't relevant to what happening in the UK.

> 'Freedom' and government authority coexist to some extent (tax is an imposition for example, but funds a military which should ensure ongoing freedom, etc.). The article needs to be read on its own merits of course but the organisation who provide it adhere to a different value judgement about where the balance of authority and anarchy should lie in society than most would agree with. That's a helpful data point I think, even if only a small part of the story.

I understand this. I've read Anarchist literature. I only care whether the analysis has any benefit. Not who produces it.

> You'll be relieved to see that the compulsory element of Digital ID (for work) has been removed at least (reported widely in press outlets yesterday evening).

Good. It needs to be totally abolished though.


As a Brit, I find it very hard to believe that you're a Brit and that your method of drawing superficial conclusions about the other participants is sound. Perhaps we are both bots here.

Instead of attacking the other participants for not being as enlightened as you may be and the source of the information, a more appreciated approach would've been to address the substance of the article.

For example, what are some "intelligence agencies and police networks in the West" that are routinely performing those kind of programmes, and why should we conclude that all of them are doing that? Are those programmes identical to the UK's "homicide prediction project", as it was originally called? Are there better legal frameworks for such programmes in other countries (say, a Constitution), or at least more democratic oversight than in the UK? Perhaps some sources that document such a conclusion would help.

You speak of lack of perspective from the commenters here, but haven't yet provided an informed one either.

> The UK is far more free than the US

Trump and his oligarchs aside, why do you believe that the UK is "far more free" than the US? And how exactly do you define that freedom? I'm no big fan of the US in general (mainly due to their neoliberal and religious culture), but to deny that they've enjoyed a variety of freedoms would be provably wrong. Different organisations measure these differently and the UK is generally not "far more free" in that sense, only marginally so - again, it depends on the frameworks employed. [0] [1]

If the definition of freedom includes democratic accountability + equal political power + civil liberties in practice: neither country is doing that great; the UK's unelected Lords/sovereignty/executive dominance and First Past the Post voting system are undeniable flaws - many if not most European countries don't have that. It's also entirely true that US has deeper structural distortions (malapportionment + Electoral College + gerrymandering + life-tenured apex judiciary).

Overall, the UK tends to score higher on broad civil-liberty/democracy assessments, but not by as far as you seem to imply. And judging by the recent developments, one wouldn't be entirely wrong to conclude that these freedoms are actively being eroded (which is what the article says). Let's not forget the deep drive of successive governments to privatise key public services which objectively gave the UK an advantage in terms of freedoms compared to US - for example universal healthcare, which works as a social safety net and effectively offering higher practical freedom of life choices for most citizens.

> levels of inequality

The UK has one of the highest levels of income inequality in Europe. [2]

"OECD figures suggest that the UK has among the highest levels of income inequality in the European Union (as measured by the Gini coefficient), although income inequality is slightly lower than in the United States." [3] "The UK spends more than anywhere else in Europe subsidising the cost of structural inequality in favour of the rich, according to an analysis of 23 OECD countries." [4]

"The key findings are that the UK has high levels of income inequality compared with similar developed economies, with a (pre-pandemic) Gini coefficient that is the second highest in the G7 (after the US), and is more unequal than all the countries in the EU other than Lithuania and Latvia." [5]

[0] https://freedomhouse.org/explore-the-map?type=all&year=2025

[1] https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/United-Kingdom/liberal_demo...

[2] https://www.understandingglasgow.com/glasgow-indicators/econ...

[3] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2023/nov/27/uk-spends...

[5] https://ifs.org.uk/inequality/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Tre...


Thanks for your considered reply, and I do appreciate my initial post was somewhat exaggerated and done in frustration.

Your own evidence, however -- albeit expressed less polemically -- seems indeed to support my conclusion, namely that on a range of measures the UK is indeed more 'free' than the US. Moreover, it is somewhat a large sleight of hand for you to say 'Trump and his oligarchs aside' when Trump is the President and Congress does not seem interested in curtailing his executive power.

Re inequality, I completely agree that the UK does poorly on inequality measures but the data is somewhat ambiguous here. E.g. the OECD picture is closer to what you describe, but the World Bank (which uses the Luxembourg Income Study) paints a different picture:

France: 31.8 Germany: 32.4 UK: 32.4 USA: 41.4

(https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI)

By this measure, the UK is not at all an outlier among the largest EU economies, while the USA is. Moreover, inequality is falling in the UK but rising in the USA so the trend further excacerbates the difference. You can explore many other inequality measures across the USA/UK at https://pip.worldbank.org/# and the picture is very consistent: the USA is less 'equal' across all measures.

I would have to dive into things more to attempt to explain the discrepancy in the two data sources. The Parliamentary report you cite does hint at a partial explanation; the family survey they use doesn't correct for many benefits, which results in an overstatement of inequality. It may also be that the World Bank is total income rather than disposable income but it's not easy to determine their precise methodology (though see https://datanalytics.worldbank.org/PIP-Methodology/surveyest...).

Re so-called pre-crime. All police organisations monitor high risk individuals through increased patrols in hotspots, targeted surveillance, etc. My point I guess is that there is not some binary scale between Minority-Report style precrime units and an hypothesised modern police form that is indifferent to risk factors. It is a scale. The 'precrime' project referred to in the article does not facilitate pre-emptive arrest but appears to provide additional risk data when allocating police resources (and probably helps with parole and rehabilitation strategies too). A touch of suspicion towards the rhetoric of the article is warranted too given the source. In any case, the UK has a long tradition of policing by consent and while there have been some regressions on policing of protest (which I deeply oppose) in general policing in the UK is good and crime is falling.


You make some good points. And thanks for taking the time to provide some sources and more nuance. I believe that overall we agree on the main points.

Re: the source (your suspicion is warranted but only marginally) - I've read numerous articles on freedomnews.org.uk over the years that were well-written, well-argued, and supported by research, at least as much as it can be expected from a magazine. It's not a scientific journal, they don't don't have a strict set of editorial guidelines (the current one is rather informal albeit still informed and focused [0]), and the article was published under the Comment section as an opinion piece.

That said, the publication has some serious history behind it; it started in 1886 by volunteers [1][2], it's arguably the longest running left periodical in Britain [9], and it's run as a cooperative / controlled by its volunteers - no small feat. It's the oldest anarchist press in the UK (and the English speaking world) and still runs the largest anarchist bookshop (one of the few in the world). [3] During the WW2 the paper played a role in disseminating the real but dismissed opposition against the war which led to a major free-speech prosecution case [10][11]. Because of its longevity it has inevitably documented a good chunk of Britain's late history, albeit from a perspective that was deeply hated by the government, the monarchy, and the industrialists [12]. (I personally see this as a positive rather than a reason to mistrust it.) Their bookshop was destroyed in an air raid in 1941 along with (critically) the remaining back-catalogue of early Freedom Press pamphlets that had been preserved up to that point [2]; it has also survived a bombing by a British neo-fascist group in 1993 and an arson attack in 2013 [13][14]. They are an institution.

Although not exactly a standard-defining magazine - they couldn't be anyway considering the philosophy they sport, they're entirely transparent about the radical perspective they bring to the table, and they're an independent media organisation funded by readers. We have to consider that fact that the majority of mainstream media players claim impartiality but they often instruct their journalists not to cross various (journalistic and non-journalistic) lines, censor critical voices, or are simply not transparent about the fact that, as businesses, they can't afford to be completely impartial if that upsets their clients (advertisers) or their owners. Another view point is at the very least welcome, even if it's not along the same lines.

I'm not looking to convince you that you should read it but I believe that you may change your opinion of it as an entirely untrusted source once I lay out a few more things.

Societies change through all kinds of contributions and actions, most of which remain unseen or unknown. A good number of famous thinkers have contributed to the magazine during its long life, many of which that we quote today as clear-minded, coherent social critics or analysts. Whether we like them or not is less relevant, what matters is that they were influent and their actions and writings have directly influenced or contributed to the social reality of today. To put it differently, FN is one of those semi-obscure magazines that has influenced the influencers.

* Peter Kropotkin (he founded Freedom News) - later influenced Aldous Huxley, Murray Bookchin, Kirkpatrick Sale, Henry Mintzberg [4][8], Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin [5]. The idea of mutualism comes from him and it's one of the most important correctives to the "all competition" misunderstanding. [6][7]

* William Morris, Michael Tippett, T. S. Eliot, Benjamin Britten [1][2]

* George Bernard Shaw, Max Nettlau [8]

* Herbert Read, Alex Comfort, Colin Ward [9]

* Emma Goldman, George Orwell, Ethel Mannin [14]

A good number of specialists, thinkers, professors, and writers still contribute to the magazine: Dr Chrys Papaioannou, Antti Rautiainen, Carlos Taibo, Owen Clayton, Spencer Beswick, John P. Clark etc.

[0] https://libcom.org/article/news-report-writing-guide

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_(British_newspaper)

[2] https://freedomnews.org.uk/freedom-press-history/ & https://freedompress.org.uk/history/

[3] https://freedomnews.org.uk/about/

[4] https://ephemerajournal.org/contribution/peter-kropotkin%25E...

[5] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/joe-peabody-peter-kr...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutualism_(biology)

[7] https://daily.jstor.org/peter-kropotkin-the-prince-of-mutual...

[8] https://www.bishopsgate.org.uk/collections/freedom-press-arc...

[9] https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/activism-solidarity/freed...

[10] https://libcom.org/article/anarchists-court-england-april-19...

[11] https://freedomnews.org.uk/2021/04/17/freedom-press-and-the-...

[12] https://freedomnews.org.uk/2017/05/25/towards-a-timeline-of-...

[13] https://freedomnews.org.uk/2013/02/01/freedom-firebombed/

[14] https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/1229-london-anar...


Thanks too for the detailed reply. You've made a good case and persuaded me to take a closer look at their reporting in the future!


Just to correct slightly, I suspect most people who write Go WebAssembly are using https://tinygo.org/, which also achieves starting binaries in the 10kb range.


The brigades are out, but most people in the UK have a high level of trust in the BBC (https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/45744-which-media-out...). This whole incident is a storm in a teacup; yes the program was edited badly, but it is a single incident. It is ridiculous that the DG and News CEO have resigned.


Specific to this politician, right and wrong don’t matter. The one skill he’s sharpened his entire life is bad faith litigation. Once he threatened to sue, BBC needed some gesture that, in court, would demonstrate contrition.


The problem is that people are frequently using SPA JS frameworks for things that are clearly not gmail of figma -- i.e. news websites and other sites with minimal interactivity or dynamic behaviour. If you are genuinely building an 'app'-like thing, then of course you need some kind of JS SPA framework, but too often people are reaching for these tools for non-app use cases.


I say if you have any reactivity whatsoever you need a framework. If you don't your code will be crap, and there's really no getting around that. Once you start doing DOM calls to update GUI you've got a mess on your hands instantly, and it will only get worse over time.


While I agree with this article's conclusion, I think it conflates political/market objections to AMP (i.e. abuse of monopoly power) with technical concerns.

For a time, I tech-led the creation of the AMP site for a major news publisher. The technical choices of AMP, excluding the CDN-aspect, are I think a great fit for publishing websites with tens-hundreds of developers who are all tempted to write bespoke JS and in so doing create performance and maintenance hell. In many respects, philosophically, I think AMP was not far of HTMX. In AMP, developers are able to construct relatively sophisticated dynamic/interactive features using simple markup (and pre-built JS components). The page is managed through a single JS runtime which helps manage performance issues. As components have a standard HTML interface, it is possible to migrate the backend to different rendering technologies partially over time unlike (for example), isomorphic JS which forces a large-scale rewrite down the line.

I tried to advocate for an in-house AMP-like solution for our main website, but it was ultimately re-written in React -- a process which took several years and resulted in a codebase of much greater complexity. (Performance was better than the old website but I'm not sure React really contributed to the gains here.)

While AMP is rightly dead, I think the technical choices it made live on (or at least, they should).


Yeah, while I basically loathed AMP for all the control and monopolization issues, I do see what Google was trying to accomplish, at least at first.

Any front end dev has had to deal with the onslaught of asks from various marketing and sales teams: "Can you add this tag library?", "We need to integrate this affiliate broker!", etc. etc. And lots of devs would push back with stuff like "At this point we load 247 3rd party tags and JS libraries and it takes 53 seconds for our page to load, we have to stop this madness!" but the problem was that for any individual marketing team ask, the impact was small and of course that team had some KPIs to hit this quarter. It was basically a sort of Tragedy of the Commons situation.

So AMP came along and essentially gave front-end devs a technical reason why they couldn't add some shitty, slow, buggy affiliate broker JS library to the code base, so when marketing came with an ask, they could simply say "Sorry, not supported in AMP, and without AMP we get downranked in Google". AMP essentially became a technical hack to align short term incentives ("We need to add some marketing feature X!") with longer term goals of faster, lighter-weight pages.


Yep. I totally see why they did it. It’s a user focus, not developer focus. Users just want faster webpages. The end.


>without AMP we get downranked in Google

Whether a site used AMP did not affect ranking in Google.


You're either uninformed or splitting hairs about what "downranked" means. Google required AMP in order to be featured in the "Top Stories" carousel that was (unsurprisingly) at the top of the results page. Google ended this requirement in mid 2021, https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/28/google_amp_core_web_v...


I'm talking about search rankings and not what appears in the OneBox.


Doesn't really matter. Google directed clicks to the AMP sites in various ways, including the OneBox. Most sites which need ad revenue had no choice but to adopt AMP.


Ranking is a closely held secret. Non AMP COULD have a negative impact. Let marketing try and get confirmation from Google that it does not.


Why couldn't they just directly downrank pages based on their size or load time?


> ...it conflates political/market objections to AMP (i.e. abuse of monopoly power)...

It never occurred to me that AMP is an initialism for "Abuse of Monopoly Power". It's deliciously fitting.


It's "accelerated mobile pages" but I love the abuse version.


Well yes, obviously Google didn't actually name it for Abuse of Monopoly Power.


Not publicly, at least.

They've put some seriously dumb admissions in writing before.

https://www.techemails.com/p/sergey-brin-irate-call-from-ste...


They learned from this and now just have periodic arbitrary layoffs to depress salaries and keep the workers scared and in line in a deniable way instead of in an explicit way.


Perhaps I'm just being dense, but I really don't see the point of AMP. If you want to build a non-bloated website, you don't need special branding from Google to do so, you just need to care about the quality of your work. Websites like HackerNews, SourceHut, and Pinboard, are living proof.

The Wikipedia article does a very poor job, in my opinion, of explaining what AMP even is. [0] It emphasises use of CDN caching to improve performance, but this can be done for any static website. What does AMP contribute? Where's the innovation?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages


It wasn't innovative or intended to be, it was a solution to a collective action problem. It's easy to make the case for "we have to do it this way to avoid being penalized in search rankings".


Doesn't Google already penalise websites for poor performance though? Why not just intensify that penalty, rather than develop and promote a new framework intended to forcibly prohibit bloat?


Sure but people won't always respond to incentives. It's like asking why AA exists when the cops will already throw you in jail for being drunk in public.

Google will rank results partially based on page performance and behavior. It is possible to improve your ranking by improving page experience. AMP is the complement: a tech stack that makes it impossible to not do those things.


When nearly every site has horrible performance IDK if it would make a difference to intensify those penalties, as they'd apply about equally for instance to every news site, every blog, every e-commerce site, etc.


But that's the same with AMP. If every site doesn't have AMP, penalizing them for not having AMP changes nothing.

In both cases it's an unstable equilibrium. The first site to be fast will get all the clicks. Or the first site to use AMP.


That was the replacement mechanism after AMP, yes


With AMP, Google could preload and pre-render sites, so things like swiping through a carousel between search results was instant.

That’s not possible without building an AMP page since it requires being able to safely serve off of google’s domain.


Thanks, that sounds like a neat feature. Regrettable than neither the Wikipedia summary, nor the Google Search AI overview, nor Google's own official summary page for AMP, [0] make this clear.

[0] https://developers.google.com/amp


AMP is a set of rules for people who are unable to stop themselves from making bad decisions. It has nothing to do with technical superiority. AMP is a deal under which, if an adopter stops acting like a jackass, they receive better search ranking. There is nothing that stops you from creating an AMP-like experience if you are naturally not a jackass.


Doesn't seem to prevent AMP sites promoted on Android/Google/Gemini assistant from using dick moves like hijacking the back button to prevent you from leaving. I can't fathom why Google doesn't drop the hammer on that behavior.


Exactly this. AMP was not a technological concern so much as a "contract": I won't act like a jackass and do anti-user things on my site and you will convey that to your readers/searchers.


> AMP is a deal under which, if an adopter stops acting like a jackass, they receive better search ranking.

You mean, jackassery like, not running ads from Google's ad platform(s)?


AMP has no relationship to Google Ads, does not require Google Ads, and does not require using Google's CDN. There are dozens of ad networks that support(ed) AMP.

Google Ads has integrations for AMP. AMP does not require Google Ads.


Perhaps not directly, but from the article:

> AMP required allowing any AMP CDN to cache your pages. Visitors might be served your page from a Google domain instead of your own, or the ad tech and other scripts on your site might be incapable of running on your AMP site (handily, it seemed, for Google, who might prefer you to use their ad tech instead).


Part of that statement is correct, part of it is misleading.

> AMP required allowing any AMP CDN to cache your pages.

Sort of correct: this is true if and only if you wanted the rank boost for Google search. If you just wanted to serve AMP and have snappy page, not entirely correct.

> other scripts on your site might be incapable of running on your AMP site

Correct, because that's the entire point of AMP. It is a straightjacket intended to make it technically impossible for your "other scripts" to run, because actual users hate your "other scripts" and they make users' phones overheat etc.


The innovation is that the page can be prerendered from cache without any privacy or analytics concerns. AMP is an open standard replacement for Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News Format.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Instant_Articles

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applenewsformat


Prerendering was old-school back then, too.

Edge caching might not have been as prevalent but was hardly new technology.

> without any privacy or analytics concerns

Uhm, yeah, no. Less bloated JS usually means less concerns but privacy violations and tracking of visitors can very much happen on AMP. Some of that risk isn't removed, just shifted.


> Uhm, yeah, no. Less bloated JS usually means less concerns but privacy violations and tracking of visitors can very much happen on AMP. Some of that risk isn't removed, just shifted.

Um, yeah, yes. The whole point of AMP (and competing proprietary formats like FBIA and ANF) is that the preloading happens from a cache owned by the link aggregator, so the publisher doesn't get your details just because its page was prerendered in the background. The link aggregator obviously already knows that you're browsing over the article link, so there is zero privacy loss.


With AMP, you basically get guard-rails to prevent your team of junior engineers from making your mobile pages too slow in exchange for increasing The Google's monopoly power. :D If I remember correctly, with AMP, you have to use their web components, and you have to pass their validator or pages won't be listed or cached at all. AMP is not really innovative in the slightest. One can easily serve pages faster than an average AMP page if they wanted to. The businesses that see engineering as a necessary evil are not properly incentivized to care about page performance, and are sometimes only prodded into doing so if a giant like The Google tells them to. Management tells their programmers that they read an article about AMP and that it makes pages load faster and reaches a wider search audience by caching and cutting out unnecessary crap; the more seasoned programmers think "Yeah, no shit – I've been trying to tell you... but I'll spend time rebuilding pages for AMP because I get paid the same either way."


> One can easily serve pages faster than an average AMP page if they wanted to

This is incorrect. You cannot beat prerendered. It does not make sense to implement AMP for people visiting your website directly. AMP is for link aggregators like search engines, news aggregators, and social media websites.


The point of AMP was to force publishers to build non-bloated websites, because they weren't doing it of their own free will.


AMP is dead


AMP is a misplaced principle, because it says “due to the constraints of mobile, web pages should be lightweight, not overdo it on interactivity, and load fast."

Instead they should have said, "Web pages should be lightweight not overdo it on interactivity, and load fast."


I like AMP conceptually, would make a good app platform for alot of types of websites and such.

I wish it was easier to fork, honestly. There's some good ideas within, though some questionable choices as well.

Unfortunately the project is rather opaque in a number of ways


How would forking work? The whole point of AMP is that a cache can validate that it is safe to prerender. If you added your own stuff, the caches would just reject it.


AMP is both a Javascript framework, and a wider page contract that facilitates CDN inclusion.

I believe the parent is referring to the Javascript framework, which itself has many nice properties for interactivity and performance.


Yea and I will say I don’t think it would be terribly hard replicate the benefits of the CDN on something like Cloudflare Workers


The point of AMP is that the link aggregator owns the cache, not the publisher. You would have to convince Google, Bing, and all the other link aggregators to use your implementation for their AMP caches. That's why it has a standards body. If you don't understand why, you don't understand the problem that AMP solves. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43733809


AMP seemed like a great technology that ended up being used for user-hostile purposes.


If you swap out AMP for ${generic_tech} this statement seems to describe the latest 15 years of software development.


It was never user-hostile. It was definitely publisher hostile but that isn't the same thing.


Of course it was user-hostile. I can't tell you how many times I would get linked to an AMP version of a page on desktop, with text spanning the entire width of the screen, and no way to get back to the 'normal' version.


The article is polemical, which I don't mean as a criticism but simply as genre description. There is no attempt to engage with the scholarly consensus (or indeed any of biblical scholarship beyond the named author). The piece wants to explain why religion persists but even on this lens it is heavy on words but lacking in depth. A lot is asserted.


You are overstating the case on authorship (we don't know who wrote Matthew and John) but otherwise you are wholly correct -- the article misrepresents the scholarly consensus. I.e. as you say, Greek was pervasive and Jesus almost certainly spoke it (along with Aramaic) and it is quite possible that gospel accounts are either written by eyewitnesses or contain the direct testimony of those who were. The historical timeline allows for this and we simply lack historical evidence to make a wholly conclusive case either way (though many attempt to do so on each side).


It is not correct to assert this. More precise is to say: it is unlikely that all of the gospels were written by the names we now associate with them -- at least not insofar as these names relate to the 12 disciples.

The truth is we don't know who wrote the gospels. The evidence is that they are quite early (i.e. for Mark, consensus is late 60s so perhaps 30-40 years after Jesus' death). In fact, many scholars think 'Mark' was written by 'Mark Antony' who is mentioned in Acts. And John may have been written by a 'John the Elder' who is mentioned elsewhere. These are educated guesses though -- the evidence is circumstantial.


> [Our] truth is we don't know who wrote the gospels

Okay, because y’all forgot? People purposely want to remake Sacred Scripture?

I mean, the Church knows who wrote them; Jesus, Mary and the Saints know; bishops and priests and the faithful knew for centuries.

Naming of Bible books isn’t about some guy holding a pen and making stuff up: the names speak to provenance, lineage, and perspective. Somewhat the same function as the “begat” passages everyone hates (because who can remember who all THOSE people were???)

If scholarship wants to move past that attribution and unmoor the books from tradition, then they can. Modern interpretations, perspectives, and hermeneutics are always in demand. But I confidently assure you that anyone who mattered was well aware of where those books came from and “who” had written them, notwithstanding meddlesome medieval monkey business.


But Mark Antony died before Jesus was born


You are correct, I meant John Mark :(.


I once sat on a bus with kids who enjoyed sightings of “Honda Chevys”. Ahh, the John Paul generation!


This is not correct. Secular academics disagree quite a lot about the specifics as we lack sufficient historical data but it is very widely accepted that:

* the gospels were written in the 1st century

It is therefore entirely possible that they were written by eyewitnesses, even though many do not think they were written by some of the 12 disciples. The topic of 'eyewitnesses' is however hotly debated. See e.g. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jesus-Eyewitnesses-Gospels-Eyewitne... which is pro this view but also plenty against.

Even John's gospel, which is often thought of as the latest, may well have been written very early; arguments for a late dating are almost wholly made in relation to the text itself (i.e. it has a 'higher' Christology) and not wider historical data.

Source: I am studying theology at Cambridge University in the UK and have heard several professors here debate these topics, plus I am familiar with the literature.


They "eyewitness" testimony would include things like Pilate talking to Jesus and the devil tempting Jesus in the desert. Or the women in Mark's gospel finding the empty tomb and then not telling anyone about it. There is a lot of legendary type of story telling that you get with ancient heroes.

Some of the teachings of Jesus might be historical.


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