Till. mind control & textual criticsm

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TILL
I want all of you skeptics to go to your banks right now, clean out your
accounts, and send all your money to me.
POOBAH
Yes Master Farrell... I will write you a check... except... Please Master
Farrell,  I'm still broke from the last time you asked, and so the err umm,
till is empty... Perhaps you could just ask me to jump off a building
instead to show my loyalty?
I mention this to segue into a side-topic that is related to some of what
goes on here. I recently finished reading _The Assassin Legends: Myths of
the Isma'ilis_ by Farhad Daftary. I'm sure many of you have read, or heard
about that famous sect of radical medieval Shiites who, thanks to their
leader's drug-induced brain-washing, became pliant assassins who, with their
brazen public killings, struck fear into leaders throughout the Middle-East
& Europe. Most westerners have heard the story via Marco Polo's account
included in his memoirs.
It's a great story, but the problem is it isn't true. Daftary does a
thorough job of dissecting the origins of the legends of the drug-crazed
assassins who are seduced in a secret garden, and who are willing to throw
themselves off buildings to prove their loyalty. Tangentially, in the
process, Daftary shows that when Marco Polo claims to have heard the legend
in Persia, that he is in fact lying; if Polo ever did travel through Persia,
he certainly never heard that story there.
There are a couple of major reasons for this conclusion. The first is that
Polo's narrative can be shown to have directly copied earlier accounts
regarding the assassins floating around Europe (which weren't found in
Persia), and most damningly, Polo refers to the leader of the sect in Persia
as "The Old Man of the Mountain." The Ismaeli's never called their leader by
this term; they did refer to their leader as sheikh, which of course means
"elder," but the term was misconstrued by European crusaders into "Old Man
of the Mountain" as they tried to understand the Ismaeli's. Importantly,
this was a term the Europeans applied to the leader of the Ismaeli's in
Syria, not Persia. So when Polo says that he was told in Persia that the
Assassins called their leader, "The Old Man of the Mountain," it would be
like a chronicler claiming that while in America he learned of the stories
of the death of "King John Kennedy the First" in his "Camelot."
Why do I bring this story up? Other than the fact that I find it
fascinating, I mention it because I doubt that anyone here has any problems
with the conclusion reached by Daftary, or the techniques used to arrive at
them. Yet the same techniques, when applied to the Gospels (showing how one
borrowed from the other, and so cannot be eye-witness testimony) or to the
Book of Daniel (anachronisms & historical inaccuracies show that the book
cannot have been written when or by whom it is claimed), engender howls of
protest about liberal bias & presupposition.
I, for one, am left to conclude that if you do not accept such techniques
when applied to the Bible, you must reject them here as well, and must
conclude that there really was a magical garden high in the Persian
mountains where young men were brain-washed with sex & drugs by a leader
with magical powers, because we have a book that says so. This, of course,
isn't the only outlandish story that must be taken at face value if such
techniques are rejected, but as we saw with Matt & the BoM, fundamentalists
of all stripes seem always eager to apply skeptical & critical techniques to
the works of others, but never to the works they consider dear.

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