The Bible Doesn’t Say What You Think it Does
by Joel Baden (Professor of Hebrew Bible Yale University)
Nearly 80 percent of all Americans think the Bible is either literally true or is the inspired word of God. And yet, most Americans have no idea what is actually in the Bible. So we have the paradoxical situation in which we as a culture “have invested the words of this book with amazing authority even when we don’t know what these words are and what they mean.”
Take for instance, the order of creation stories in Genesis:
GENESIS I
Watery chaos
Day 1: Let there be light
Day 2: God puts a bubble in the middle of the waters giving us the seas below and the heavens above
Day 3: Land emerges, and from that land grows all vegetation
Day 4: Sun and the moon and the stars
Day 5: Animals start to be created. First fish, then birds. “Be fruitful and then multiply”. They are to be successful species even before humans are created.
Day 6: Land animals, domestic animals, wild animals, creepy crawlies and eventually humans. God created humanity in his image, male and female he created them.
There is only one way to read this. On the 6th day of creation made man and woman simultaneously, both in the divine image, and then he blesses them. Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and master it.
Day 7: God rested.
GENESIS II
“On the day that God made Earth and Heaven”. Was this on Day 3? “When no shrub of the field was yet on the earth” So, in the middle of day 3 between the land and the plants. “Because the Lord God had not sent rain upon the earth.” There was no mention of rain in Genesis I. The plants simply grew on the 3rd day, perhaps damp from its watery chaotic state. “And there was no man to till the soil” But why should anyone need to till the soil when the plants had already grown by themselves three days earlier? “A flow would well up from the ground to water the earth” It seems to imply that we have stopped talking about a watery chaos from which land emerges, and a dry dusty earth to which water is being added. “And the Lord God formed man from the dust of the earth”. There’s the dust again.
Everything in Genesis II has been a single sentence.
“On the day that the Lord made earth and heaven … the Lord God formed man from the dust of the earth”. (Which day?)
And there was a lady with him. Where did she go?
God creates a garden, plops the man down into it, from the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree (but trees are supposed to have been created on day 3, before man).
Adam seems to be lonely, so God famously formed out of the earth all the wild beasts and all the birds of the sky. (But wild beasts are day 6, birds are day 5 and man is after both of them. Where is the lady, and why are animals created according to this story - not to be fruitful and fill the earth - but as man’s plaything. There is no reference to being plentiful.
Adam has no great rapport with any of the animals, and so famously God knocks him out, grabs a rib and fashions it into a woman. Here’s the lady, after man, even after the animals.
Most people could tell you the broad outlines of this story, but no one can tell you a single story that takes into account all the details of the Bible. The reason is we don’t have a single story here. There are two accounts of creation, and they have differences and major contradictions. What makes it impossible to read these two creation stories as a single story is the plain facts, the plot points.
So what’s the original state of the earth before creation? Is it watery or is it dusty?
How long does creation take, six days or one day?
What’s the order of creation? Trees-Animals-Humans or Humans-Trees-Animals? In other words is man created last or first?
What’s man’s domain expected to be? Is he supposed to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, or was it to hang out forever in a garden?
What about the woman? Is she created simultaneously with man simultaneously in the image or God or secondarily to man in the image of rib?
These kinds of contradiction render the issue of literal historical truth, a category error. If one of these stories is true, the other one by definition cannot be. But they’re both in the Bible.
It’s not just how creation happened that is at stake here, it’s what creation means. It’s that deeper fundamental truth that people seek in the Bible. The entire environmental movement is here. If you think that plants existed three days before we did, then we are but a small part in of a global ecosystem. Environmentalists, Genesis I is for you. If you are not so environmentally minded, you can always look at Genesis II where the plants are created entirely and solely for our sustenance. Animal rights is the same issue. Were the animals supposed to be a successful species before we arrived on the planet, or were they created to be our plaything? Gender equality is obviously a big one. Was woman created simultaneously with man, equally blessed, equally in the divine image, or was she created secondarily, literally a byproduct of man. These are big questions, now and always, with major ramifications, and the Bible does not have one answer to them. It has two answers. Two contradictory viewpoints.
For people in the fervently secularist camp, the presence of the text of these kinds of contradictions means we should just chuck the whole thing in the trash. To me this is bad theological math. …
If there are two contradictory creation stories in the Bible, that doesn’t happen by chance. Someone made that happen. Whoever put these stories together, even if we think it was God - especially if you think it was God - made a choice that we as serious readers of the text need to reckon with, not gloss over or try to interpret away, but actually, come to terms with. Whoever put these stories together, effectively privileged form over content, that he was willing to sacrifice easy meaning and singularity of perspective for the presence of scripture of multiple perspectives. He was happy with an incomprehensible plot, an impossible story than to have to give up one of these two viewpoints.
If we as a culture are going to invest the Bible with authority and privilege it as a source of truth, then we really can’t pretend the Bible is anything other than what it is, and it is anything other than a single clear statement of belief or truth.
It’s a jumble of beliefs, its a mixture of opinions, its a combination of voices, and that multi-vocality is embedded in the text right from the word go, in the first two chapters of Genesis. It’s almost like a statement of intent: Here is what this book is.
When we read the Bible this way, the notion of the truth, in the Biblical sense has to sort of thrown out. There are many truths here. There are all equally Biblical, equally scriptural, authoritative, valued by our traditions. The Bible doesn’t preserve some original claim that is there for us to retrieve. There are many original claims.
We live today in a world of religious cacophony, lots of different voices, and it turns out that is the Bible too. We value those societies that welcome people with different religious ideas. We actually don’t care very much what those ideas are, or at least we shouldn’t, its the principle of inclusion that matters to us. It turns out that is the Bible too. It encodes the kinds of religious pluralism that has existed in all places, at all times, including when the Bible itself was written. That is what it preserves for us - religious pluralism.
….
The Bible is the ultimate source of authority, and its also completely indecisive. So what do we do with it then? What use is it? This text that our culture, for better or worse, holds most sacred, this text is a living reminder that human interaction, even in the fraught realm of religion is founded on dialogue and not monologue. … It’s founded on the inclusion of differences, and not their exclusion. It’s the agreement to disagree, even about the most fundamental issues of human existence.
For people who really give it a lot of weight to the Biblical text, who really care about it, who are invested in its authority, the presence in the Bible of different opinions shouldn’t be a cause for concern, I think quite the contrary. I think the presence of the Bible of these different voices may make it challenging, certainly more challenging than if it were simple clear statements, but it also makes it worth a damn. It changes it from a prop into something far more interesting. It forces us to stop simply using it and to start reading it again, and I feel like if we did more of that, we mind find it’s pretty useful after all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS7LgbMr1m4
Monotheism, Disbelief and the Hebrew Bible, with Francesca Stavrakopoulou
Professor Tim Whitmarsh talks to Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou from the University of Exeter about monotheism and disbelief in the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament. They discuss how these slippery concepts might be seen to intersect with the historical events of the formative ‘Persian period’ (mid-6th to mid-4th century BCE), when Cyrus the Great allowed Jerusalem elites to return to their city after a period of exile in Babylon. Professor Stavrakopoulou explains how the issue of belief vs disbelief is a Christian, confessional notion that cannot be easily retrojected onto the world of the Hebrew bible - a world that was, we discover, animated by debates about the relative power and strength of different divine beings. And she goes on to sketch the polytheistic backdrop to early Judaism with reference to the intriguing storyline of the Book of Job, in which we find Yahweh at a council of deities to test the religious steadfastness of the book’s unlucky protagonist….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrDT0gBfewk
Did Jesus Even Exist?
Richard Carrier has a Ph.D. in the history of philosophy from Columbia University, and is a published philosopher and historian, specializing in contemporary philosophy of naturalism, and in Greco-Roman philosophy, science, and religion, and the origins of Christianity. He blogs regularly, lectures for community groups worldwide, and teaches courses online. He is the author of many books including Sense and Goodness without God, On the Historicity of Jesus, and Proving History, as well as chapters in several anthologies and articles in academic journals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUYRoYl7i6U
A History of God
I explain how I learned from A History of God by Karen Armstrong that the evidence indicates that the Jewish concept of monotheism evolved from the syncretism of various polytheistic sources like Canaanite and Babylonian polytheism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlnnWbkMlbg
Archeology of the Hebrew Bible
William Dever, Professor Emeritus at the University of Arizona, has investigated the archeology of the ancient Near East for more than 30 years and authored almost as many books on the subject. In the following interview, Dever describes some of the most significant archeological finds related to the Hebrew Bible.
NOVA: Have biblical archeologists traditionally tried to find evidence that events in the Bible really happened?
William Dever: From the beginnings of what we call biblical archeology, perhaps 150 years ago, scholars, mostly western scholars, have attempted to use archeological data to prove the Bible. And for a long time it was thought to work. [William Foxwell] Albright, the great father of our discipline, often spoke of the “archeological revolution.” Well, the revolution has come but not in the way that Albright thought. The truth of the matter today is that archeology raises more questions about the historicity of the Hebrew Bible and even the New Testament than it provides answers, and that’s very disturbing to some people.
Yet many people want to know whether the events of the Bible are real, historic events.
We want to make the Bible history. Many people think it has to be history or nothing. But there is no word for history in the Hebrew Bible. In other words, what did the biblical writers think they were doing? Writing objective history? No. That’s a modern discipline. They were telling stories. They wanted you to know what these purported events mean. The Bible is didactic literature; it wants to teach, not just to describe. We try to make the Bible something it is not, and that’s doing an injustice to the biblical writers. They were good historians, and they could tell it the way it was when they wanted to, but their objective was always something far beyond that.
I like to point out to my undergraduate students that the Bible is not history; it’s his story-Yahweh’s story, God’s story. [Yahweh is an ancient Israelite name for God.]
Even if archeology can’t prove events of the Bible, can it enhance our understanding of the Bible?
Archeology is almost the only way that we have for reconstructing a real-life context for the world out of which the Bible came, and that does bring understanding. When you think of how little we knew about the biblical world even 100 years ago and what we know today, it’s astonishing.
According to the Bible, the first person to form a covenant with God is Abraham. He is the great patriarch. Is there archeological evidence for Abraham?
One of the first efforts of biblical archeology in the last century was to prove the historicity of the patriarchs, to locate them in a particular period in the archeological history. Today I think most archeologists would argue that there is no direct archeological proof that Abraham, for instance, ever lived. We do know a lot about pastoral nomads, we know about the Amorites’ migrations from Mesopotamia to Canaan, and it’s possible to see in that an Abraham-like figure somewhere around 1800 B.C.E. But there’s no direct connection.
Why is it difficult for archeologists to find support for the accounts of the patriarchs?
It disturbs some people that, for the very early periods such as the so-called patriarchal period, we archeologists haven’t much to say. The later we come in time, the firmer the ground we stand on-we have better sources. We have more written sources. We have more contemporary eyewitness sources. For the earlier periods, we don’t have any texts. Abraham might have lived around 1800 B.C.E. This is the dawn of written history or prehistory, when the archeological evidence can’t easily be correlated with any external evidence, textual evidence-even if we did have it.
EVIDENCE OF THE EARLY ISRAELITES The Bible chronology puts Moses much later in time, around 1450 B.C.E. Is there archeological evidence for Moses and the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of Israelites described in the Bible?
We have no direct archeological evidence. “Moses” is an Egyptian name. Some of the other names in the narratives are Egyptian, and there are genuine Egyptian elements. But no one has found a text or an artifact in Egypt itself or even in the Sinai that has any direct connection. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. But I think it does mean what happened was rather more modest. And the biblical writers have enlarged the story. [For more on Moses and the Exodus, see Carol Meyer’s interview.] Is there mention of the Israelites anywhere in ancient Egyptian records?
No Egyptian text mentions the Israelites except the famous inscription of Merneptah dated to about 1206 B.C.E. But those Israelites were in Canaan; they are not in Egypt, and nothing is said about them escaping from Egypt.
What have archeologists learned from these settlements about the early Israelites? Are there signs that the Israelites came in conquest, taking over the land from Canaanites?
The settlements were founded not on the ruins of destroyed Canaanite towns but rather on bedrock or on virgin soil. There was no evidence of armed conflict in most of these sites. Archeologists also have discovered that most of the large Canaanite towns that were supposedly destroyed by invading Israelites were either not destroyed at all or destroyed by “Sea People”-Philistines, or others. So gradually the old conquest model [based on the accounts of Joshua’s conquests in the Bible] began to lose favor amongst scholars. Many scholars now think that most of the early Israelites were originally Canaanites, displaced Canaanites, displaced from the lowlands, from the river valleys, displaced geographically and then displaced ideologically. So what we are dealing with is a movement of peoples but not an invasion of an armed corps from the outside. A social and economic revolution, if you will, rather than a military revolution. And it begins a slow process in which the Israelites distinguish themselves from their Canaanite ancestors, particularly in religion-with a new deity, new religious laws and customs, new ethnic markers, as we would call them today.
If the Bible’s story of Joshua’s conquest isn’t entirely historic, what is its meaning?
Why was it told? Well, it was told because there were probably armed conflicts here and there, and these become a part of the story glorifying the career of Joshua, commander in chief of the Israelite forces. I suspect that there is a historical kernel, and there are a few sites that may well have been destroyed by these Israelites, such as Hazor in Galilee, or perhaps a site or two in the south.
The Bible describes it as a glorious kingdom stretching from Egypt to Mesopotamia. Does archeology back up these descriptions?
The stories of Solomon are larger than life. According to the stories, Solomon imported 100,000 workers from what is now Lebanon. Well, the whole population of Israel probably wasn’t 100,000 in the 10th century. Everything Solomon touched turned to gold. In the minds of the biblical writers, of course, David and Solomon are ideal kings chosen by Yahweh. So they glorify them. Now, archeology can’t either prove or disprove the stories. But I think most archeologists today would argue that the United Monarchy was not much more than a kind of hill-country chiefdom. It was very small-scale.
Does archeology in Jerusalem itself reveal anything about the Kingdom of David and Solomon?
We haven’t had much of an opportunity to excavate in Jerusalem. It’s a living city, not an archeological site. But we have a growing collection of evidence-monumental buildings that most of us would date to the 10th century, including the new so-called Palace of David. Having seen it with the excavator, it is certainly monumental. Whether it’s a palace or an administrative center or a combination of both or a kind of citadel remains to be seen.
The Bible would have us think that all Israelites embraced monotheism relatively early, from Moses’s time on. Is that contrary to what archeology has found?
The portrait of Israelite religion in the Hebrew Bible is the ideal, the ideal in the minds of those few who wrote the Bible-the elites, the Yahwists, the monotheists. But it’s not the ideal for most people. And archeology deals with the ordinary, forgotten folk of ancient Israel who have no voice in the Bible. There is a wonderful phrase in Daniel Chapter 12: “For all those who sleep in the dust.” Archeology brings them to light and allows them to speak. And most of them were not orthodox believers. However, we should have guessed already that polytheism was the norm and not monotheism from the biblical denunciations of it. It was real and a threat as far as those who wrote the Bible were concerned. And today archeology has illuminated what we could call “folk religion” in an astonishing manner.
One of the astonishing things is your discovery of Yahweh’s connection to Asherah. Tell us about that.
In 1968, I discovered an inscription in a cemetery west of Hebron, in the hill country, at the site of Khirbet el-Qí´m, a Hebrew inscription of the 8th century B.C.E. It gives the name of the deceased, and it says “blessed may he be by Yahweh”-that’s good biblical Hebrew-but it says “by Yahweh and his Asherah.” Asherah is the name of the old Canaanite Mother Goddess, the consort of El, the principal deity of the Canaanite pantheon. So why is a Hebrew inscription mentioning Yahweh in connection with the Canaanite Mother Goddess? Well, in popular religion they were a pair.
One of the astonishing things is your discovery of Yahweh’s connection to Asherah. Tell us about that.
In 1968, I discovered an inscription in a cemetery west of Hebron, in the hill country, at the site of Khirbet el-Qí´m, a Hebrew inscription of the 8th century B.C.E. It gives the name of the deceased, and it says “blessed may he be by Yahweh”-that’s good biblical Hebrew-but it says “by Yahweh and his Asherah.” Asherah is the name of the old Canaanite Mother Goddess, the consort of El, the principal deity of the Canaanite pantheon. So why is a Hebrew inscription mentioning Yahweh in connection with the Canaanite Mother Goddess? Well, in popular religion they were a pair.
This has been something of a lightning rod, has it not?
This is awkward for some people, the notion that Israelite religion was not exclusively monotheistic. But we know now that it wasn’t. Monotheism was a late development. Not until the Babylonian Exile and beyond does Israelite and Judean religion-Judaism-become monotheistic.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/archeology-hebrew-bible.html
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Why Moses Did Not Write the Torah The Torah – the first five books of the Hebrew Bible – was traditionally held to be the work of Moses, as dictated by God. But starting with some rabbinic voices in the 11th and 12th centuries, doubts were raised. Among the details that challenged the notion that Mosaic authorship:
Other details were noticed as well. Certain parts of the Torah use words for places and things that are different from other parts. For instance, some stories (Exodus 3, 17, and 31; Deuteronomy everywhere but once) used “Horeb” as the name for the mountain where Moses receives the Law, while other parts of the story (Exodus 16, 19, 31, 34; Leviticus and Numbers throughout; and Deuteronomy 33) use the name “Sinai”. Some stories throughout use the name “Amorites” for the original dwellers of Canaan, while others use the word “Canaanites”. Moses’ father-in-law is named as Jethro in most stories, but in others he is named Reuel.
http://www.mesacc.edu/~thoqh49081/handouts/torahclues.html
6 Great Reasons that Moses Could Never Have Written the Bible
by Jay Solomon (M.A. in comparative religion from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, B.A. in History and Religious Studies from the University of Pennsylvania)
Reason number one is that the Bible NEVER claims to be authored by Moses or anyone else for that matter. No one internally claims authorship. If Moses authored the Bible, you think he’d have said something - or anyone who wanted to be remembered for doing so for that matter. Only later religious people, hoping to attribute authorship and lend validity, claimed that Moses was the author.
Another issue is time. The Pentateuch is written in such a way - and doesn’t try to hide the fact! - that implies looking backward. It refers to the present day by saying things like “until this day” or “that was current then.” For instance, Genesis 23:16 refers to weights and measures as they were current in the time of the story, not the author’s time. Things are said in Moses’ time that they are there until this day.
Getting things plain wrong is a problem too. Presumably if God was telling Moses the way things were, he wouldn’t get facts wrong. For instance, in Genesis 21:32-34, the Bible speaks of Abraham residing in the land of the Philistines, a people that, archaeologically speaking, weren’t in the land until hundreds and hundreds of years after the supposed time of Abraham.
Mistakes and inconsistencies exist in the text, problems that surely Moses, if God were telling him what to say, would not have created. The reason for these problems, scholars have discovered, is that there are multiple authors’ voices and texts in the Pentateuch. In fact, Genesis through Deuteronomy is the weaving together of multiple texts to create one story. It was done very well but the originals were not changed. Some characters have multiple names, contradicting or repeating stories, etc. We don’t have to get into the details here but this is called the Documentary Hypothesis. If you want to know more, we can talk about it. Just ask.
Logical inconsistencies exist. Read the first verse of Deuteronomy. “These are the words that Moses spoke to all Israel beyond the Jordan.” Well, it’s logically impossible for Moses to have written such a sentence. “Beyond the Jordan” means on the other side of the Jordan (though some crappier translations try to gloss over this wording, the original biblical Hebrew has precisely this meaning) and it is a biblical fact that Moses never went into the land of Canaan. Therefore, if he was only on the eastern side of the Jordan River and the person said he spoke on the other side of the Jordan River the person writing must logically be writing from inside of Canaan (approximately modern day Israel). That person can’t be Moses. Get it?
Moses can’t speak of his own death, right? In the end of Deuteronomy, Moses talks of his own death - saying, “Moses died.” The author also says that Moses was “unequaled” after we are told earlier that Moses was the most humble man ever. Seems illogical that he could say both things about himself, huh?
Scholars have identified three literary traditions in Genesis, as in Deuteronomy, usually identified as the Yahwist, Elohist, and Priestly strains. The Yahwist strain, so called because it used the name Yahweh (Jehovah) for God, is a Judaean rendition of the sacred story, perhaps written as early as 950 BCE. The Elohist strain, which designates God as Elohim, is traceable to the northern kingdom of Israel and was written 900-700 BCE. The Priestly strain, so called because of its cultic interests and regulations for priests, is usually dated in the 5th century BCE and is regarded as the law upon which Ezra and Nehemiah based their reform. Because each of these strains preserves materials much older than the time of their incorporation into a written work, Genesis contains extremely old oral and written traditions.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Genesis-Old-Testament
The Torah (Law, Pentateuch, or Five Books of Moses) - Composition and authorship
The traditional Jewish and Christian view has been that Moses was the author of the five books, that “of Moses” means “by Moses,” citing in support passages in the Pentateuch itself that claim Mosaic authorship. Since these claims, however, are written in the third person, the question still arises as to the authorship of the passages; e.g., in Deuteronomy, chapter 31, verse 9: “And Moses wrote this law, and gave it to the priests . . . and to all the elders of Israel.” The last eight verses of Deuteronomy (and of the Pentateuch), describing Moses’ death, were a problem even to the rabbis of the 2nd century CE, who held that “this law” in the verse quoted refers to the whole Torah preceding it. There are also other passages that seem to be written from the viewpoint of a much later period than the events they narrate.
The documentary hypothesis Beyond these obvious discrepancies, modern literary analysis and criticism of the texts has pointed up significant differences in style, vocabulary, and content, apparently indicating a variety of original sources for the first four books, as well as an independent origin for Deuteronomy. According to this view, the Tetrateuch is a redaction primarily of three documents: the Yahwist, or J (after the German spelling of Yahweh); the Elohist, or E; and the Priestly code, or P. They refer, respectively, to passages in which the Hebrew personal name for God, YHWH (commonly transcribed “Yahweh”), is predominantly used, those in which the Hebrew generic term for God, Elohim, is predominantly used, and those (also Elohist) in which the priestly style or interest is predominant. According to this hypothesis, these documents-along with Deuteronomy (labelled D)-constituted the original sources of the Pentateuch. On the basis of internal evidence, it has been inferred that J and E are the oldest sources (perhaps going as far back as the 10th century BCE), probably in that order, and D and P the more recent ones (to about the 5th century BCE). Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers are considered compilations of J, E, and P, with Leviticus assigned to P and Deuteronomy to D.
The Yahwist, or J, is the master of narrative in biblical literature, who sketches people by means of stories. He takes his materials wherever he finds them, and if some are crude he does not care, as long as they make a good story. The book of Genesis, for example, contains the story of Abraham’s passing off his wife as his sister, so if the king took her as a concubine he would honour her supposed brother instead of having her husband killed, a story told by J without any moralistic homily. Not given to subtle theological speculations, J nearly always refers to the Deity as YHWH, by his specifically Israelite personal name (usually rendered “the Lord” in English translations), though he is not hidebound and also employs the term Elohim (“God”), especially when non-Hebrews are speaking or being addressed. He presents God as one who acts and speaks like human persons, a being with whom they have direct intercourse. The Yahwist, however, has one very definite theological (or theo-political) preoccupation: to establish Israel’s divinely bestowed right to the land of Canaan.
More reflective and theological in the apologetic sense is the Elohist, or E. No fragment of E on the primeval history (presented in the first 11 chapters of Genesis) has been preserved, and it is probable that none ever existed but that the Elohist began his account with the patriarchs (presented in the remainder of Genesis, in which the J and E strands are combined). The first passage that can be assigned to E with reasonable certainty is chapter 20 of Genesis, which parallels the two J variants of the “She is my sister” story noted above. Unlike these, it tries to mitigate the offensiveness of the subterfuge: though the patriarch did endanger the honour of his wife to save his life, his statement was not untrue but merely (deliberately) misleading. The Elohist is also distinct from the Yahwist in generally avoiding the presentation of God as being like a human person and treating him instead as a more remote, less directly accessible being. Significantly, E avoids using the term YHWH throughout Genesis (with one apparent exception), and it is only after telling how God revealed his proper name to Moses, in chapter 3 of Exodus, that he refers to God as YHWH regularly, though not exclusively. This account (paralleled in the P strand in chapter 6 of Exodus) is apparently based on a historical recollection of Moses’ paramount role in establishing the religion of YHWH among the Israelites (the former Hebrew slaves). Also noteworthy is E’s choice of the term prophet for Abraham and his characterization of a prophet as one who is an effective intercessor with God on behalf of others. This is in line with his speculations on the unique character of Moses as the great intercessor as compared with other prophets (and also with Joshua as Moses’ attendant).
It is inferred from certain internal evidence that E was produced in the northern kingdom (Israel) in the 8th century BCE and was later combined with J. Because it is not always possible or important to separate J from E, the two together are commonly referred to as JE.
The third major document of the Tetrateuch, the Priestly code, or P, is very different from the other two. Its narrative is frequently interrupted by detailed ritual instructions, by bodies of standing laws of a ritual character, and by dry and exhaustive genealogical lists of the generations. According to one theory, the main author of P seems to have worked in the 7th century and to have been the editor who combined the J and E narratives; for his own part, he is content to add some brief, drab records-with frequent dates-of births, marriages, and migrations. The P material is to be found not merely in Leviticus but throughout the Tetrateuch, including the early chapters of Genesis and one of the creation accounts and ranging from the primeval history (Adam to Noah) to the Mosaic era. Like the Elohist, P uses the term Elohim for God until the self-naming of God to Moses (Exodus, chapter 3, in the P strand) and shows a non-anthropomorphic transcendent stress.
The Deuteronomist, or D, has a distinctive hortatory style and vocabulary, calling for Israel’s conformity with YHWH’s covenant laws and stressing his election of Israel as his special people (for a detailed consideration of D, see below Deuteronomy: Introductory discourse). To the Deuteronomist or the Deuteronomic school is also attributed the authorship of the Former Prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings), which scholars call the “Deuteronomic history.”
… most scholars still accept the documentary theory, in its basic lines, as the most adequate and comprehensive ordering of the variegated Pentateuchal materials.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/biblical-literature/Old-Testament-literature
Authorship of the Pentateuch
by Monika Bajic
… Around the third century C.E. the concept of Ezra as author became fairly prominent (cf. 2 Esd 14:19-48). It was believed initially that the Torah had been written by Moses, but was later burnt, and then “was miraculously rewritten by Ezra” (Soninno 2010, 247). Later, obvious problems related to the text of the Pentateuch were more and more noted such as why Moses did not write in the first person, the report on the death of Moses and the period of mourning for him in Deuteronomy 34:5-9, and double 3 and sometimes triple reports on the same events. Furthermore, other apparent discrepancies and disagreements were noticed, for instance: Gen 7:15 - Noah gathered two of each animal, but 7:2-3 states specifically seven pairs of animals; Gen 7:11, 17, 24 and 8:3 specify certain time intervals of the flood that are hard to match, and Gen 14:14 mentions the territory of Dan’s tribe, although Dan received his land only after Moses’ death (Judg 18). Thus, even in the pre-Enlightenment era, several authors had noticed the discrepancies and soon started to articulate their assumptions more clearly (Carpenter 1986, 3:742-43). With the dawn of the Enlightenment period emerged new studies on the Pentateuch and with it new critical approaches.
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Form and Traditio-Historical Criticism
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Hermann Gunkel played a major role in establishing a different technique known as Form Criticism (FC) (Formgeschichte) (Carpenter 1986, 3:748-49). Arnold (2003, 627) writes that Gunkel argued that “behind the J and E sources of Genesis were collections of sagas preserved orally for centuries, instead of relatively late writings of a few great individual writers.” Specifically, his approach to the text is trying to define the individual life setting (Sitz im Leben) to each section which was previously overlooked (Carpenter 1986, 3:748-49). As successor of the FC came Traditio-Historical criticism. Albrecht Alt and Martin Noth (later also Gerhard von Rad) were the leading scholars of this method. They strove to “describe the process leading up to the formation of the longer written source documents” (Alexander 2012). It was Noth who reasoned for a 7 It is generally assumed that this document is a fabrication of the northern kingdom because of its focus on “Bethel, Shechem, and Joseph tribes, Ephraim and Manasseh” (see LaSor et al. 1996, 10). 220 KAIROS - Evangelical Journal of Theology / Vol. X No. 2 (2016), pp. 215-223 “common-base text (or ‘G’ for Grundlage)” which was used by separate authors of the J, E, and P sources (Arnold 2003, 628). Houtman writes, “Both von Rad and Noth have, each with his own emphasis, directed attention to the various stages of the process by which the Pentateuch came into being (Überlieferungsgeschichte [tradition history])” (Houtman). …
Ultimately, one has to accept what most biblical scholars have accepted - that the Pentateuch is a combined work of numerous pre-existing sources (irrelevant if Moses was or was not one of the author[s] or editor[s]) (Alexander 2012).
https://hrcak.srce.hr/file/250904
Pentateuch
In the 19th cent., some scholars began to apply a new philosophy of history to the problems of OT criticism. This system, developed by the philosopher Hegel, insisted that history moved from the simple to the complex through a series of stages that he called thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. On this basis, E. Reuss in 1833 and Vatke in 1835 both considered the priestly code (the P document) as the most complex of the laws of the Bible and therefore the latest. In evolutionary fashion a simple religion had to precede the complex external religion of the priests. In 1866, Graf, a pupil of Reuss, developed these ideas further by attempting to show that the laws of the OT always moved from the simple to the complex. The simplest laws were the Ten Commandments (Exod 20). The so-called Covenant Code (Exod 21-23) was more complex and so it was the next to be written. Still more complex in details were the laws of Deuteronomy, which came about the time of Josiah (621 b.c.). Finally, the most complex laws were those of P, written after the time of Ezekiel. Graf showed that D knew the stories of J and E, but did not know the laws and some of the stories of P. It was in these years that Charles Darwin developed his views, which were largely Hegelian, based on the development of life from simple to complex forms. This same type of philosophy continued to be applied to the critical views of the Pentateuch. In 1874 the Dutch scholar Kuenen flatly stated that the religion of Israel was purely a man-made religion, which developed, (or evolved) like all other religions-from a simple animism to gross polytheism, then to a limited form of polytheism, which was called henotheism, and thence to the ethical monotheism of the great writing prophets such as Isaiah. Then came the cultic centralization of the Deuteronomist and finally postexilic sacerdotalism (the P document). In 1870, J. Wellhausen wrote a book that popularized Graf’s views and thus they became generally accepted in Germany. Wellhausen in his work on the history of Israel denied all the supernaturalism of the Pentateuch and regarded most of its history as unreliable. By 1900, these views were generally accepted by Biblical critics all over the world. W. Robertson Smith in Scotland, S. R. Driver in England and Francis Brown and Charles A. Briggs in America were among the men responsible for spreading these views in their respective countries. The only American scholar who attempted to answer the higher critics of the Pentateuch was William H. Green in his Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch. S. R. Driver’s Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament and R. H. Pfeiffer’s Old Testament Introduction generally represent the higher criticism as it is held by many naturalistic OT scholars to this day.
https://www.biblicaltraining.org/library/pentateuch
Computerized Source Criticism of Biblical Texts
Idan Dershowitz, Novot Akiva, Moshe Koppel, Nachum Dershowitz
We have developed an automated method to separate biblical texts according to author or scribal school. At the core of this new approach is the identification of correlations in word preference that are then used to quantify stylistic similarity between sections. In so doing, our method ignores literary features-such as possible repetitions, narrative breaks, and contradictions-and focuses on the least subjective criterion employed by Bible scholars to identify signs of composi-tion. The computerized system is unique in its ability to consider subtle stylistic preferences in aggregate, whereas human scholars are generally limited to cases where a word preference is pronounced. Our method is also less liable to accusa-tions of bias, thanks to its reliance on context-independent criteria. Its eficacy is demonstrated in its successful deconstruction of an arti???cial book, Jer-iel , made up of randomly interleaved snippets from Jeremiah and Ezekiel. When applied to Genesis-Numbers, the method divides the text into constituents that correlate closely with common notions of “Priestly” and “non-Priestly” material.
According to the biblical account, Moses’ parents were from the tribe of Levi, one of the groups in Egypt called Hebrews. Originally the term Hebrew had nothing to do with race or ethnic origin. It derived from Habiru, a variant spelling of ???apiru (Apiru), a designation of a class of people who made their living by hiring themselves out for various services. The biblical Hebrews had been in Egypt for generations, but apparently they became a threat, so one of the pharaohs enslaved them. Unfortunately, the personal name of the king is not given, and scholars have disagreed as to his identity and, hence, as to the date of the events of the narrative of Moses. One theory takes literally the statement in I Kings 6:1 that the Exodus from Egypt occurred 480 years before Solomon began building the Temple in Jerusalem. This occurred in the fourth year of his reign, about 960 bce; therefore, the Exodus would date about 1440 bce.
This conclusion, however, is at variance with most of the biblical and archaeological evidence. The storage cities Pit???om and Rameses, built for the pharaoh by the Hebrews, were located in the northeastern part of the Egyptian delta, not far from Goshen, the district in which the Hebrews lived. It is implicit in the whole story that the pharaoh’s palace and capital were in the area, but Thutmose III (the pharaoh in 1440) had his capital at Thebes, far to the south, and never conducted major building operations in the delta region. Moreover, Edom and Moab, petty kingdoms in Transjordan that forced Moses to circle east of them, were not yet settled and organized. Finally, as excavations have shown, the destruction of the cities the Hebrews claimed to have captured occurred about 1250, not 1400.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Moses-Hebrew-prophet
Did the Exodus of Moses and His People Happen? “There is virtually no evidence, as the Torah says, that 600,000 Jewish males, with their wives and children and elders, left Egypt in the Exodus,” said Rabbi Burt Visotzky, a professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. “Those are big numbers. You’d think someone would notice.”
In the Hebrew Bible, the body of water is called Yom Suf, which translates to Sea of Reeds, leading some scholars to suggest that the story is talking about a swamp instead of a huge body of water.
“When it comes to Moses, again, you have a really larger-than-life portrait,” said William Dever, a professor of archaeology from Lycoming College. “I doubt that the miracles attributed to him ever took place. I don’t think he led three million Israelites out of Egypt in an exodus across the Sinai. I don’t think he was the founder of Israelite religion, but I think there was a Moses. I argue, and I think some other archaeologists will, too, there was a small exodus group – not millions of people, but perhaps a few thousand – who did escape from slavery in Egypt.”
http://abcnews.go.com/International/exodus-moses-people-happen/story?id=18068905
Moses and the Exodus
You and other scholars point out that there isn’t evidence outside the Bible, in historic documents and the archeological record, for a mass migration from Egypt involving hundreds of thousands of people. But it may be plausible that there was a much smaller exodus, an exodus of people originally from the land of Canaan who were returning to it. Is that right?
Carol Meyers, an archeologist and professor of religion at Duke University: Yes. Despite all the ways in which the exodus narratives in the Bible seem to be non-historic, something about the overall pattern can, in fact, be related to what we know from historical sources was going on at the end of the Late Bronze Age [circa 1200 B.C.E.], around when the Bible’s chronology places the story of departure from Egypt. Now, what is the evidence? First of all, during this period there likely were a lot of people from the land of Canaan, from regions of the eastern Mediterranean, in Egypt. Sometimes they were taken there as slaves. The local kings of the city-states in Canaan would offer slaves as tribute to the pharaohs in order to remain in their good graces. This is documented in the Amarna letters discovered in Egypt. So we know that there were people taken to Egypt as slaves. There were also traders from the eastern Mediterranean who went to Egypt for commercial reasons. And there also probably were people from Canaan who went to Egypt during periods of extended drought and famine, as is reported in the Bible for Abraham and Sarah. So Canaanites went to Egypt for a variety of reasons. They were generally assimilated-after a generation or two they became Egyptians. There is almost no evidence that those people left. But there are one or two Egyptian documents that record the flight of a handful of people who had been brought to Egypt for one reason or other and who didn’t want to stay there. Now, there is no direct evidence that such people were connected with the exodus narrative in the Bible.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/moses-exodus.html
Did the Red Sea Part? No Evidence, Archaeologists Say
Archaeologist, Dr. Zahi Hawass:
“Really, it’s a myth,” Dr. Hawass said of the story of the Exodus, as he stood at the foot of a wall built during what is called the New Kingdom.
“If they get upset, I don’t care,” Dr. Hawass said. “This is my career as an archaeologist. I should tell them the truth. If the people are upset, that is not my problem.”
The story of the Exodus is celebrated as the pivotal moment in the creation of the Jewish people. As the Bible tells it, Moses was born the son of a Jewish slave, who cast him into the Nile in a basket so the baby could escape being killed by the pharaoh. He was saved by the pharaoh’s daughter, raised in the royal court, discovered his Jewish roots and, with divine help, led the Jewish people to freedom. Moses is said to have ascended Mt. Sinai, where God appeared in a burning bush and Moses received the Ten Commandments.
(Image) A grave containing a female skeleton near the military fort. Egyptian archaeologists say no evidence has surfaced to confirm the Exodus story.
In Egypt today, visitors to Mount Sinai are sometimes shown a bush by tour guides and told it is the actual bush that burned before Moses.
But archaeologists who have worked here have never turned up evidence to support the account in the Bible, and there is only one archaeological find that even suggests the Jews were ever in Egypt. Books have been written on the topic, but the discussion has, for the most part, remained low-key as the empirically minded have tried not to incite the spiritually minded.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/03/world/africa/03exodus.html
Did Jewish Slaves Build the Pyramids? It’s a popular story, but all the evidence tells us that no Jews were in Egypt at the time of the Pyramids.
The best estimates are that 10,000 men spent 30 years building the Great Pyramid. They lived in good housing at the foot of the pyramid, and when they died, they received honored burials in stone tombs near the pyramid in thanks for their contribution. This information is relatively new, as the first of these worker tombs was only discovered in 1990. They ate well and received the best medical care. And, also unlike slaves, they were well paid. The pyramid builders were recruited from poor communities and worked shifts of three months (including farmers who worked during the months when the Nile flooded their farms), distributing the pharaoh’s wealth out to where it was needed most. Each day, 21 cattle and 23 sheep were slaughtered to feed the workers, enough for each man to eat meat at least weekly. Virtually every fact about the workers that archaeology has shown us rules out the use of slave labor on the pyramids.
The Letter of Aristeas, written in Greece in the second century BCE, records that Jews had been sent into Egypt to assist Pharaoh Psammetichus I in his campaign against the Nubians. Psammetichus I ruled Egypt from 664 to 610 BCE, which perfectly matches the archaeological dating of the Elephantine garrison in 650.
If Jews were not in Egypt at the time of the pyramids, what about Israelites or Hebrews? Israel itself did not exist until approximately 1100 BCE when various Semitic tribes joined in Canaan to form a single independent kingdom, at least 600 years after the completion of the last of Egypt’s large pyramids. Thus it is not possible for any Israelites to have been in Egypt at the time, either slave or free; as there was not yet any such thing as an Israelite. It was about this same time in history that the earliest evidence of the Hebrew language appeared: The Gezer Calendar, inscribed in limestone, and discovered in 1908. And so the history of Israel is very closely tied to that of Hebrews, and for the past 3,000 years, they’ve been essentially one culture.
But if neither Jews nor Israelites nor Hebrews were in Egypt until so many centuries after the pyramids were built, how could such a gross historical error become so deeply ingrained in popular knowledge?
The story of Jewish slaves building the pyramids originated with Herodotus of Greece in about 450 BCE. He’s often called the “Father of History” as he was among the first historians to take the business seriously and thoroughly document his work. Herodotus reported in his Book II of The Histories that the pyramids were built in 30 years by 100,000 Jewish slaves [In point of fact, Herodotus only says 100,000 workers. He does not mention either Jews or slaves. So even this popular belief seems to be in error, and the origin of the idea of Jews building the pyramids remains a mystery - BD]. Unfortunately, in his time, the line between historical fact and historical fiction was a blurry one. The value of the study of history was not so much to preserve history, as it was to furnish material for great tales; and a result, Herodotus was also called the “Father of Lies” and other Greek historians of the period also grouped under the term “liars”. Many of Herodotus’ writings are considered to be fanciful by modern scholars. Coincidentally, the text of the Book of Exodus was finalized at just about exactly the same time as Herodotus wrote The Histories.
Which brings us to the final question: Was there a mass Exodus of Jewish slaves out of Egypt? There is no record of any such thing ever happening, and the simple reason is that there is no time in which it could have happened. No Egyptian record contains a single reference to anything in Exodus; and by the time there were enough Jews living in Egypt to constitute an Exodus, the time of the pyramids was long over. And Pharaoh Ramesses can be let off the hook as well: With apologies to Yul Brynner, no documentary or archaeological evidence links any of the Pharaohs bearing this name with plagues or Jewish slaves or edicts to kill babies. Indeed, the earliest, Ramesses I, wasn’t even born until more than a thousand years after the Great Pyramid was completed. His grandson, the great Ramesses II, lived even later.
https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4191
Did the Exodus Really Happen?
Surveys of ancient settlements–pottery remains and so forth–make it clear that there simply was no great influx of people around the time of the Exodus (given variously as between 1500-1200 BCE). Therefore, not the wandering, but the arrival alerts us to the fact that the biblical Exodus is not a literal depiction. In Israel at that time, there was no sudden change in the kind or the volume of pottery being made. (If people suddenly arrived after hundreds of years in Egypt, their cups and dishes would look very different from native Canaanites’.) There was no population explosion. Most archeologists conclude that the Israelites lived largely in Canaan over generations, instead of leaving and then immigrating back to Canaan.
The probability is, given the traditions, that there were some enslaved Israelites who left Egypt and joined up with their brethren in Canaan. This seems the likeliest scenario, a beautiful one that accords with the deeper currents of biblical tradition. The Exodus was a very small-scale event with a large, world-changing trail of consequences.
Some people are surprised, even upset, by these views. Yet they are not new; such views have been a staple of scholarship, even appearing in popular magazines, for many years. Not piety but timidity keeps many rabbis from expressing what they have long understood to be true.
Moses: Myth, Fiction or History?
In the early days of biblical archaeology there was a lot of optimism that the new science could verify the existence of Moses by proving that there was indeed a great migration of people from Egypt who eventually conquered and settled Canaan. This premature optimism was dashed by the stark reality of subsequent excavations. In The Bible Unearthed , Israeli archaeologists Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman dispelled any illusions that their digs had verified the story of the Exodus: “The process that we describe here is, in fact, the opposite of what we have in the Bible: the emergence of early Israel was an outcome of the collapse of the Canaanite culture, not its cause. And most of the Israelites did not come from outside Canaan - they emerged from within it. There was no mass Exodus from Egypt. There was no violent conquest of Canaan. Most of the people who formed early Israel were local people - the same people whom we see in the highlands throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages. The early Israelites were - irony of ironies - themselves originally Canaanites!” [1] (Finkelstein & Silberman The Bible Unearthed, 118) [ Italics added]
Their conclusion was a severe blow to those who believed that Moses had been a real person. But the question of the prophet’s existence - whether he was indeed a flawed flesh-and-blood man or a fictional character forced to jump through his creator’s hoops is a thorny one; not easily dismissed or answered. The biblical story of the great man is full of contradictions and puzzles. Unlike the story of Joseph which has a discernable beginning, middle and end, Moses’ narrative is scattered and disjointed. At first we are led to believe that he is a first child; only for it to be revealed later that he has older siblings. We’re told he was adopted by an Egyptian princess but no details of his childhood are offered. The only account of his death is sketchy to say the least and no one knows where one of the most significant figures in history is buried. These troubling mysteries led some scholars to doubt his existence.
http://www.ancient-origins.net/history-famous-people/moses-myth-fiction-or-history-002246
Francesca Stavrakopoulou is Professor of Hebrew Bible & Ancient Religion at Exeter University. She says that figures like Moses and King Solomon didn’t exist. She says the stories incorporate various mythical elements and became historicized for political and ideological purposes.
https://soundcloud.com/historyhit/the-historical-reliability-of
Unavoidable contradictions
Not only was the Bible taken largely and blatantly from previous stories, but there are contradictions so massive that they defy belief. Here are just a few of them.
Noah’s Ark: The story of the Ark is that a pair of every animal on earth was put on the ship. Forgetting for a second the fact that the story came directly from the Epic of Gilgamesh, keep in mind we’re being asked to believe that two 500-year-old people are caring for tens of thousands of animals. And where did they keep the food? How did they keep the poisonous snakes from biting the other animals? And where did they get the polar bears, alligators, and thousands of other animals that that don’t live in the Middle East?
The Angel’s Message: In Matthew 1:20 it says the Angel spoke to Joseph. In Luke 1:28 he spoke to Mary. Which was it?
Mary’s Virginity: The Hebrew word ‘Almah’, which people took to mean virgin, actually means ‘young woman of marriage age’. And there are plenty of indications that Jesus had brothers and sisters.
The Census: The authors of the Bible are trying so hard to get Jesus born in Bethlehem that they craft a story about a census. They say that Joseph had to travel back to his father’s homeland in order to register for it. Can you seriously imagine-in any period let alone then-asking the entire country to travel back their father’s hometown to register for a census? It’s completely impossible. The author of the story put it in there because they needed Jesus born in that city. Plus, historians note that the Romans kept extraordinary records, and there wasn’t even a census at that time. It’s completely fabricated, and for obvious reasons.
Jesus and the Family: The Bible says honor your father and mother, yet Jesus says you must hate your father, mother, wife, children, and even your own life to be a disciple, and says to call no man on earth your father. (MT 10:35-37, LK 12:51-53, 14:26, MT 23:9)
God and Murder: God says killing is wrong, yet he advocates genocide. (EX 34:11-14, LV 26:7-9)
God and Slavery: We all know slavery to be wrong, yet God openly advocates it. (GN 17:12, EX 12:43, EX: 21:1, EX 21:20, EX 21:32, LV 22:10, LV 25:44, LK 7:2, CL 3:22)
Jesus’s Heritage: There are two different genealogies for Jesus given in the Bible, and they don’t match. One is curiously given through Joseph, which is strange since he’s not Jesus’s father. Why give a genealogy through someone who isn’t related to you?
The Passover: It’s widely understood that God is supposed to be all-seeing and all-knowing. If that’s true, then why did he need people to mark their houses with blood in order to keep from killing their babies inside?
Kill Your Son to Prove You Love Me: God told Abraham to kill his son to prove that he loved God. Abraham raised the knife to him, about to do it, and God called it off-pleased that he would have done it. Does that sound like a moral God to you?
This is just a tiny sample of the inconsistencies and moral problems with the Bible.
https://danielmiessler.com/blog/the-bible-is-fiction-a-collection-of-evidence/
The Contradiction Argument: Two Stories of the Same Event Biblical scholars have noticed that there are many instances in the Bible where there are two similar yet clearly different versions of what seem to be the same event. If this is true, then if we take one of the stories as literally true then the second version cannot be taken literally. For example, many people do not realize that there are two different stories about the creation of the universe in Genesis. We will focus on the sixth day of creation. The first version in Genesis states as follows: God said, “Let the earth bring forth every kind of living creatures: cattle, creeping things, and wild beasts of every kind.” And it was so. God made wild beasts of every kind and cattle of every kind, and all kinds of creeping things of the earth. And God saw that this was good. And God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. They shall rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the cattle, the whole earth, and all the creeping things that creep on earth.” And God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them (Genesis 1:24-27). So what is the order of creation here? First God created the animals, and then he created man and woman, apparently creating man and woman at the same time. Now let us look at the more familiar second version that appears just a little later in Genesis. The Lord God formed man from the dust of the earth. He blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being··· The Lord God said, “It is not good for man to be alone; I will make a fitting helper for him.” And the Lord God formed out of the earth all of the wild beasts and all of the birds of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that would be its name. And the man gave names to all the cattle and to the birds of the sky and to all the wild beasts; but for Adam no fitting helper was found. So the Lord God cast a deep sleep upon the man; and, while he slept, He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that spot. And the Lord God fashioned the rib that He had taken from the man into a woman; and he brought her to the man (Genesis 2:7, 18-22). In the second version, God first created man, then the animals, and lastly woman. This differs from the first version where the animals came first before man, and as we noticed arguably man and woman were then formed at the same time after the animals. Clearly, these versions are different, so if you take one literally you cannot take the other one literally.
A second example of contradictory stories is regarding the death of Aaron, Moses’ brother. In Numbers 33:38 (See also Numbers 20:22-29) the Bible says that “Aaron the priest ascended Mount Hor at the command of the LORD, and died there···” while in Deuteronomy 10:6 it says that “the Israelites marched to Moserah. Aaron died there and was buried there···” If you take the first passage literally, Aaron died at Mount Hor, but then the second passage cannot be taken literally that says Aaron died and was buried at Moserah.
Our third example returns us to the biblical story of Noah and the flood. According to Genesis 6:19 God ordered Noah to bring “of all that lives, of all flesh, you shall take two of each into the ark to keep alive with you; they shall be male and female.” A little later in Genesis 7:2-3 it states “of every clean animal you shall take seven pairs, males and their mates, and of every animal which is not clean, two, a male and its mate.” There is no R. S. Firestone 313 mention of seven pairs of animals in the first version. In order to make the passages consistent, we could interpret the first passage as only referring to unclean animals. If we do so, however, we are interpreting, not taking the Bible literally. The words in the first version say “of all lives, of all flesh.” Taken literally, this would
A fourth example is a rather detailed story which appears in Genesis 12:10-20 about when Abraham went into Egypt and deceitfully told Pharaoh that Sarah was his sister when in fact Sarah was Abraham’s wife. This story seems to be retold in Genesis 20:1-7 with some significant variations. In the second version, Abraham’s deception takes place in the land of Gerar instead of in Egypt and Abraham deceives King Abimelech instead of Pharaoh. Now we could choose to believe that Abraham pulled the same stunt twice in different places, but the text never indicates that Abraham had done this before, or that Abraham had failed to learn any lessons from his earlier actions. It seems likely that these are two versions of only one event. If so, then if we take one story to be literally true, then the other story cannot be. If we choose, on the other hand, to believe that Abraham lied to two different rulers then we will avoid having contradicting stories, but we would be interpreting the events as being separate even though they appear so similar and there is no acknowledgement that the deception was taking place for a second time.
The New Testament, too, is not immune from discrepancies between its different books. For example, there are at least 4 different versions of the precise words that appear on a sign put over Jesus after he is crucified (Compare Matthew 27:37, Mark 15:26, Luke 23:38, John 19:19); There are competing versions for who was Jesus’ 1st Apostle and the subsequent order of the Apostles who next joined and followed Jesus (Compare Luke 5:1-10 and John 1:35-45); There are different stories of the fig tree (See Mark 11:12-26, and Luke 13:6-8); In two versions of the parable of the Vineyard Owner some of the master’s slaves are killed (Matthew 21:33-36, Mark 12:1-6) while a third version states that they were not killed, but rather all were only beaten (Luke 20:9-12); Jesus’ last words vary in different books (See Mark 15:34 and Matthew 27:46 vs. Luke 23:46); In one book Jesus seems to have been crucified on the day of preparation for Passover (John 13:1 and 19:13-16), but in the other books he is crucified after the Passover dinner. (See for example Matthew 26:17-27:50); lastly, there are various versions about who went to the tomb to see Jesus after the crucifixion, and who actually saw Jesus thereafter (Compare John 20:1-20; Matthew 28:1-10; Mark 16:1-10; and Luke 24:1-24). Malcolm Murray points out some further discrepancies in both the Old and New Testaments-including discrepancies regarding our moral duties: The ark is said to have contained two tablets given to Moses and “nothing else” (1 Kings 8:9), yet it also contained manna and Aaron’s rod that had “budded” (Heb. 9:4). Those that seek God shall find Him (Prov. 8:17, Matt. 7:8, Luke 11:8-10), yet elsewhere it is admitted that many will not find God even if they seek Him (Ps. 18:41, Prov. 1:28, Lev. 3:8, 3:44, Amos 8:12, Luke 13:24). Apart from one ram, what is the proper sacrifice to God during the new moon? Two young bullocks and seven lambs (Num. 28:11). One young bullock and six rams (Ezek. 46:6). Should we rejoice when our enemies suffer? Yes (Ps. 18:10). No (Prov. 24:17). Can a divorced woman remarry? Yes (Deut. 24:1-2). No (Luke 16:18). Is it okay for a theist to marry an atheist? Yes (1 Cor. 7:12-14). No (Cor. 6:14-17). Is long hair on men good? Yes (Num. 6:5, Judges 13:5, 1 Sam. 1:11). No (1 Cor. 11:44) (Murray, 2010: p. 47). James Barr presents us with additional biblical contradictions: Theological statements of scripture about God, if all taken literally, lead to mutual contradictions, which are usually overcome only by abandoning the literal level of interpretation··· According to St. Paul, man is justified by faith, and not by works; but St. James avers that “by works a man is justified, and not by faith only” (James 2.24). God ’is not a man that he should repent," we are told in 1 Samuel 15.29: that is, unlike human beings, God does not change his mind: but elsewhere the Old Testament tells us repeatedly of God’s changing of his mind, the most notable being his regret that he had created humanity at all, Gen 6.6. Taken literally, these pairs of sayings appear to produce contradictions: Man is justified by faith, no he isn’t, he is justified by works; God does not change his mind, yes he does, several times in central biblical themes. If one sticks to pure literality these are insuperable contradictions (Barr, 1989: p. 417). Barr further points out that contradictions in the biblical texts can appear by the silence or absence in some books of important stories told in other books. For example, the virgin birth story is “clear in Matthew, muted in Luke, and literally absent from Mark and John···” (Barr, 1989: p. 423). R. S. Firestone 314 Indeed, the many contradictions both within and between the books of the Old and New Testament preclude one from being able to logically claim that they take the Bible literally. If they take one of the stories, claims, or laws/rules literally, then they cannot take the competing ones literally.
Although some of the events in both the Old and New Testaments are recorded in history, the Biblical writers make a hash of it. Historians generally believe that there was no exodus of Jewish slaves out of Egypt as described in the Bible, or in fact, any of the subsequent conquest events described in Exodus. We know that Asa could not possibly have mustered an army of 580,000 Israelites and then used that army to slaughter a million Cushites (as described in 2 Chronicles 14); Bronze Age goatherders and desert warriors could not plausibly have maintained lines of supply for armies that big. (By contrast, for example, the Athenian invasion of Sicily - occurring nearly a thousand years later - was less than 1% of the size of the fantastic numbers frequently claimed in the Bible!) For this and other reasons, it is not surprising that none of these hundred-thousand-person battles attested to in the Bible are corroborated by any other source.
Similarly, although the historian Josephus chronicles the life and reign of Herod the Great in agonizing detail, he somehow never sees fit to mention the supposed slaughter of the innocents ordered by Herod described in Matthew 2:16-18. Is it more reasonable to believe that Josephus simply forgot to describe what would have been one of the worst atrocities in history - or that the passage in Matthew is a reworking of (and allegory to) Pharoah’s slaughter of the Jewish innocents described in Exodus 1:22-2:1?
In other words: when we review a Bible, we see that the historical events described therein are best categorized today as “historical fiction” - that is, real events embellished for literary and other reasons, and fictional events that are told in a historical setting but with garbled details, persons, and so forth. This is also true of the Gospels - they mangle contemporary historical events (as partially described above), are uncorroborated by contemporary historians, and bear the marks of legendary development and creative fiction.
https://evaluatingchristianity.wordpress.com/the-summary-case-for-atheism/arg2long/
Nearly all evidence for Solomon’s life and reign comes from the Bible (especially the first 11 chapters of the First Book of Kings and the first nine chapters of the Second Book of Chronicles). According to those sources, his father was David (flourished c. 1000 bce), the poet and king who, against great odds, founded the Judaean dynasty and united all the tribes of Israel under one monarch. Solomon’s mother was Bathsheba, formerly the wife of David’s Hittite general, Uriah. She proved to be adept at court intrigue, and through her efforts, in concert with the prophet Nathan, Solomon was anointed king while David was still alive, despite the fact that he was younger than his brothers.
Material evidence for Solomon’s reign, as for that of his father, is scant. Although some scholars claim to have discovered artifacts that corroborate the biblical account of his reign in the early 10th century bce, others claim that the archaeological record strongly suggests that the fortified cities and even the Temple of Jerusalem actually emerged more than a century later. In the latter view, the kingdom of Solomon was far from the vast empire that the biblical narrative describes.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Solomon
King Solomon’s Mines Rediscovered?
“If he built the temple during the tenth century B.C., he-according to the Bible-had to bring a lot of copper to Jerusalem, and the copper had to come from somewhere,” said Amihai Mazar, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who was not involved with the study.
If the Bible’s accounts of David and Solomon are rooted in reality, it’s reasonable to figure the copper came from the closest known source-the contemporaneous site excavated by Levy and Jordanian archaeologist Mohammad Najjar in the area the Bible calls Edom.
Historical Extremes
Seventy years ago American archaeologist Nelson Glueck declared he’d found “King Solomon’s mines” around the area Levy’s team is excavating.
“He was in the ‘Golden Age’ of biblical archaeology between the World Wars,” Levy said of Glueck.
“He literally mapped everything that he saw archaeologically to the biblical narrative.”
By the mid- to late-20th century, the tide had turned: Many academics were finding no verifiable connection between the Old Testament and actual history from the 12th through 9th centuries B.C.
Some believe that any useful historical accuracy in the holy book was lost during a period of revisions that is believed to have occurred between the seventh and fourth centuries B.C.
Research beginning in the 1970s determined Glueck’s mine site became active only in the 7th century BC-hundreds of years after David and Solomon would have lived.
To this day, little archaeological evidence has been found to confirm the reigns of either King David or King Solomon.
“To what extent the Bible really recalls ancient historical reality from the tenth century is hard to say,” said the Hebrew University’s Mazar, who has been to the site but was not involved with the study.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/10/081028-king-solomon-copper-mine-missions.html
The Bible’s Buried Secrets - Ep. 1 Did King David’s empire exist
Did King David’s Empire Exist? Dr Francesca Stavrakopoulou goes on the trail of the Biblical King David and his fabled empire. A national hero and icon for the Jewish people, and a divine king for Christians, David is best known as the boy-warrior who defeated the Philistine giant Goliath. As king, he united the tribes of Israel. But did he really rule over a vast Israelite kingdom? Did he even exist?
Stavrakopoulou visits key archaeological excavations where ground-breaking finds are being unearthed, and examines evidence for and against the Biblical account of King David. She explores the former land of the Philistines, home of the giant Goliath, and ruins in the north of Israel and in old Jerusalem itself purporting to be remains of David’s empire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhiABi6vw3A
Although the book of Samuel, and initial parts of the books of Kings, portray Saul, David and Solomon ruling in succession over a powerful and cosmopolitan united kingdom of Israel and Judah, Finkelstein and Silberman regard modern archaeological evidence as showing that this may not be true. Archaeology instead shows that in the time of Solomon, the northern kingdom of Israel was quite small, too poor to be able to pay for a vast army, and with too little bureaucracy to be able to administer a kingdom, certainly not an empire;[25] it only emerged later, around the beginning of the 9th century BCE, in the time of Omri.[26] There is little to suggest that Jerusalem, called by the Bible David’s capital, was “perhaps not more than a typical hill country village” during the time of David and of Solomon,[27] and Judah remained little more than a sparsely populated rural region, until the 8th century BCE.[28][29] Though the Tel Dan Stele seems to confirm that a “House of David” existed, and “clearly validates the biblical description of a figure named David becoming the founder of the dynasty of Judahite kings in Jerusalem”, it says nothing else about him.[30]
There are remains of once grand cities at Megiddo, Hazor and Gezer, with archeological evidence showing that they suffered violent destruction.[31] This destruction once was attributed to the 10th century BCE campaigns by Shishak, these cities therefore being ascribed to David and Solomon as proof of the Bible’s account of them,[32] but the destruction layers have since been redated to the late 9th century BCE campaign of Hazael, and the cities to the time of the Omride kings.[32]
The Tel Dan Stele, the Mesha Stele, the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser, and direct evidence from excavations, together paint a picture of the Omride kings ruling a rich, powerful, and cosmopolitan empire, stretching from Damascus to Moab,[33] and building some of the largest and most beautiful constructions of Iron Age Israel;[34] by contrast, the Bible only remarks that the Omrides ‘married foreign women’ (presumably to make alliances) and upheld Canaanite religion, both of which it regards as wicked.[35] The Bible Unearthed concludes that the biblical writers deliberately invented the empire, power, and wealth, of Saul, David, and Solomon, by appropriating the deeds and achievements of the Omrides, so that they could then denigrate the Omrides and obscure their accomplishments, since these kings held a religious viewpoint that was anathema to the biblical editors.[36]
…
The Bible claims that nearly 200,000 men in the army besieging Jerusalem were slaughtered one night by an angel, causing the Assyrian king Sennacherib to relent and return to Assyria; it immediately goes on to state that Sennacherib was killed by his sons, while he was praying to his god, implying that this was shortly after the battle. However, as The Bible Unearthed points out, this contrasts with the Assyrian record on the Taylor Prism,[45] in which Hezekiah’s mercenaries abandoned him, and he only then convinced the Assyrian army to leave by handing over not only vast amounts of money, jewels, and high quality ivory-inlaid furniture, but also his own daughters, harem, and musicians, and making Judah into a tributary state of the Assyrians.[46] Additionally, although Sennacherib was clearly murdered (by person(s) uncertain), it was in 681 BCE; he had lived for over 19 years beyond the end of the siege, conducting several military campaigns elsewhere, and rebuilding and refurnishing his palace entirely.
Hezekiah predeceased Sennacherib, dying just a couple of years after the siege. His successor (and son), Manasseh, reversed the religious changes, re-introducing religious pluralism; Finkelstein and Silberman suggest that this may have been an attempt to gain co-operation from village elders and clans, so that he would not need so much centralised administration, and could therefore allow the countryside to return to economic autonomy.[47] According to the archaeology there must have been a deliberate expansion of agriculture into the Judean desert,[48] and the rich finds from this period suggest that much profit was gained from Judah’s now peaceful position in the middle of many of the caravan routes between Assyria’s allies;[48] the state certainly increased its administration of trade to levels that far exceed those before.[49]
Hezekiah’s actions had given away the gold and silver from the Jerusalem Temple,[50] impoverished his state, lost him his own daughters and concubines,[46] and reduced his territory to a small region around Jerusalem, most of the people elsewhere in Judah being deported; Manasseh had brought peace and prosperity back to the country,[51] but because the Book of Kings bases its decisions on theological prejudice, it condemns him as the most sinful monarch ever to rule Judah and hails instead Hezekiah as the great king.[52] The Bible Unearthed suggests that the priesthood and populace outside Jerusalem may well have held the opposite opinion-that Hezekiah’s imposition of monolatry was blasphemous, and the disasters that befell the country during his reign had been punishment from the gods.[53]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bible_Unearthed
A young shepherd named David from the tribe of Judah slays the giant Goliath from the enemy tribe of the Philistines, is elevated to king of Judah following the death of Saul at the close of the 11th century B.C., conquers Jerusalem, unites the people of Judah with the disparate Israelite tribes to the north, and thereupon amasses a royal dynasty that continues with Solomon well into the tenth century B.C. But while the Bible says David and Solomon built the kingdom of Israel into a powerful and prestigious empire stretching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, from Damascus to the Negev, there’s a slight problem-namely, that despite decades of searching, archaeologists had found no solid evidence that David or Solomon ever built anything.
Ilan himself doubts that Mazar has found King David’s palace. “My gut tells me this is an eighth- or ninth-century building,” he says, constructed a hundred years or more after Solomon died in 930 B.C. More broadly, critics question Mazar’s motives. They note that her excavation work was underwritten by two organizations-the City of David Foundation and the Shalem Center-dedicated to the assertion of Israel’s territorial rights. And they scoff at Mazar’s allegiance to the antiquated methods of her archaeological forebears, such as her grandfather, who unapologetically worked with a trowel in one hand and the Bible in the other.
The once common practice of using the Bible as an archaeological guide has been widely contested as an unscientific case of circular reasoning-and with particular relish by Tel Aviv University’s contrarian-in-residence Israel Finkelstein, who has made a career out of merrily demolishing such assumptions.
He and other proponents of “low chronology” say that the weight of archaeological evidence in and around Israel suggests that the dates posited by biblical scholars are a century off. The “Solomonic” buildings excavated by biblical archaeologists over the past several decades at Hazor, Gezer, and Megiddo were not constructed in David and Solomon’s time, he says, and so must have been built by kings of the ninth-century B.C.’s Omride dynasty, well after David and Solomon’s reign.
During David’s time, as Finkelstein casts it, Jerusalem was little more than a “hill-country village,” David himself a raggedy upstart akin to Pancho Villa, and his legion of followers more like “500 people with sticks in their hands shouting and cursing and spitting-not the stuff of great armies of chariots described in the text.
…
“Maybe Goliath never existed,” says Garfinkel as he drives across the bridge and up to his site, Khirbet Qeiyafa. “The story is that Goliath came from a giant city, and in the telling of it over the centuries, he became a giant himself. It’s a metaphor. Modern scholars want the Bible to be like the Oxford Encyclopedia. People didn’t write history 3,000 years ago like this. In the evening by the fire, this is where stories like David and Goliath started.”
…
[David] has persisted for three millennia-an omnipresence in art, folklore, churches, and census rolls. To Muslims, he is Daoud, the venerated emperor and servant of Allah. To Christians, he is the natural and spiritual ancestor of Jesus, who thereby inherits David’s messianic mantle. To the Jews, he is the father of Israel-the shepherd king anointed by God-and they in turn are his descendants and God’s Chosen People. That he might be something lesser, or a myth altogether, is to many unthinkable.
“Our claim to being one of the senior nations in the world, to being a real player in civilization’s realm of ideas, is that we wrote this book of books, the Bible,” says Daniel Polisar, president of the Shalem Center, the Israeli research institute that helped fund Eilat Mazar’s excavation work. “You take David and his kingdom out of the book, and you have a different book. The narrative is no longer a historical work, but a work of fiction. And then the rest of the Bible is just a propagandistic effort to create something that never was. And if you can’t find the evidence for it, then it probably didn’t happen. That’s why the stakes are so high.”
The books of the Old Testament outlining the story of David and Solomon consist of scriptures probably written at least 300 years after the fact, by not-so objective authors. No contemporaneous texts exist to validate their claims. Since the dawn of biblical archaeology, scholars have sought in vain to verify that there really was an Abraham, a Moses, an Exodus, a conquest of Jericho.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/print/2010/12/david-and-solomon/draper-text
Joel M. Hoffman, who holds a PhD in theoretical linguistics, has taught Bible in religious settings and translation theory at Brandeis University and at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City. He is the chief translator of the widely read My People’s Prayer Book series (winner of the National Jewish Book Award), and author of both the critically acclaimed In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language (NYU Press) and the popular And God Said: How Translations Conceal The Bible’s Original Meaning (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press).
Dr. Joel M. Hoffman:
Some stories in the Bible were meant to be history, others fiction. But modernity has obscured the original distinction between the two kinds of biblical writing, depriving readers of the depth of the text.
Perhaps surprisingly, this confusion lies at the heart of the History Channel’s miniseries “The Bible,” which continues the pattern of blurring history and fiction, and thereby misrepresenting the nature of the Bible to its viewers.
One way to understand the difference between history and fiction in the Bible is through the Old Testament’s natural division into three parts:
Sometimes ‘believing the Bible’ means believing that a story in it didn’t happen. The world and its nature (Adam to Terah). The Israelites and their purpose (Abraham to Moses). The Kingdom of Israel and life in Jerusalem (roughly from King David onward). Even a cursory look reveals a clear and significant pattern.
In the first section, characters live many hundreds of years, and in the second, well into their second century. Only in the third section do biblical figures tend to live biologically reasonable lives.
For example, Adam, in the first section, lives to the symbolic age of 930, and Noah lives even twenty years longer than that. Abraham, from the second section, lives to be 175, his son Issac to 180, and Jacob “dies young” at the age of 147. But the lifespans from King David onward, in the third section, are in line with generally accepted human biology.
Furthermore, historians mostly agree that only the third section represents actual history.
The reasonable ages in the third section of the Bible, and, in particular, the wildly exaggerated ages in the first, suggest that the authors of the Old Testament intended only the third part as history. Underscoring this crucial difference, some of the lifespans in the first two sections are so absurd as to defy literal interpretation. These hugely advanced ages are central clues about the point of the stories.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-joel-hoffman/the-bible-isnt-history_b_2803409.html
How should we interpret the Genesis flood account?
The story of Noah, the ark, and the Flood in Genesis 6-9 is one of the most famous and controversial passages in the entire Bible. The story, centered around a global cataclysm and a floating wooden zoo, has captured the imagination of people for millennia. Until modern times, most Christians assumed the story referred to an actual worldwide event that happened in the relatively recent past, and this interpretation of the Flood continues to be a central feature of young-earth creationism. However, the discoveries of modern science, as well as an explosion of new knowledge about the ancient world of the Bible, have decisively challenged whether this interpretation is the best reading of the text. This includes the work of many Christian scholars and scientists who were (and continue to be) guided by a belief that all truth is God’s truth, that Scripture is inspired, and that the testimony of nature should not be ignored. The scientific and historical evidence is now clear: there has never been a global flood that covered the entire earth, nor do all modern animals and humans descend from the passengers of a single vessel.
The Genesis Flood story contains many literary clues that its writers (and original audience) were not intended to narrate an actual series of events. The story employs the literary device known as “hyperbole” throughout, describing a massive ark which holds representatives of “every living creature on Earth”, and a flood which flows over the tops of the highest mountains in the world. These are not meant to challenge readers to figure out the practicality of such descriptions, but rather they are important clues that we are dealing with a theological story rather than ancient journalism.
There are other clues that the writers are not intending to relate a literal series of events. One is the command given to Noah to treat “clean” animals differently than “unclean” animals, even though those categories were not given to the Hebrew people until the time of Moses, much later in the biblical story. Also, the massive size of the ark, coupled with the huge number of animals on board and the length of the flood, all indicate that the story is not to be read literally.
https://biologos.org/common-questions/biblical-interpretation/genesis-flood
Why do most modern scholars reject a reading of the Bible as history much less as literal fact?
In an age of science and technology, too much of the Bible is simply unbelievable to today’s mind and turns people away from the underlying messages. From a scientific standpoint, many of the “facts” in the Bible are simply wrong. One of many examples: according to Genesis, the universe is just over 6000 years old. According to physics, the Big Bang occurred 13.7 billion years ago.
Many of the stories are also scientifically impossible, like the tale of Joshua stopping the sun moving across the sky. This story assumes (as was the thinking then) that the earth was flat and was at the center of the universe. We simply know this to be false. Second, for the sun to stop would mean that the earth would have to cease rotating on its axis - an event which would destroy the planet.
For many of the miracle stories, natural explanations exist. The authors of these stories lived in an age when people believed that solar eclipses were divine omens, disease was divine punishment, and mental illness was caused by demon possession. In the case of Jesus, healing was an important part of his ministry. However, today we can find faith healers in Haiti who practice voodoo and in tribal Africa who practice witchcraft. Many of these modern-day faith healers have patients who are actually healed by these practices. Doctors call this the placebo effect, an effect so powerful that drugs must undergo double blind experiments.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-small/mythology-and-the-bible_b_898253.html
Is the Bible Fact or Fiction? Does Archaeology Tell Us if the Events in the Bible Really Occurred? K. Kris Hirst
Kris has a BS in Education from Illinois State University; and an MA in Anthropology from the University of Iowa. She is a member in good standing of the Society for American Archaeology, the Archaeological Institute of America, the Register of Professional Archaeologists and the National Association of Science Writers.
..Using ancient texts as the basis for historical investigation was–and still is–fraught with peril in any culture: and not just because the ‘truth’ is hard to parse out.
Governments and religious leaders have vested interests in seeing that religious texts and nationalistic myths remain unchanged and unchallenged: other parties might learn to see the ancient ruins as blasphemous.
Nationalistic mythologies demand that there is a special state of grace for a particular culture, that the ancient texts are received wisdom, that their specific country and people are the center of the creative world. An explicit expression of this is Archaeology Quote #35, by the Nazi Heinrich Himmler.
NO PLANET-WIDE FLOODS When early geological investigations proved without a doubt that there was no planet-wide flood as described in the Old Testament of the bible, there was a great cry of outrage. Early archaeologists fought against and lost battles of this sort time and again. The results of David Randal-McIver’s excavations at Great Zimbabwe, an important trading site in southeastern Africa, were suppressed by the local colonial governments who wanted to believe that the site was Phoenician in derivation, not African.
https://www.thoughtco.com/is-the-bible-fact-or-fiction-167135
The Book of Genesis’s Flood Story Mirrors The Epic Of Gilgamesh From Hundreds Of Years Earlier Here are a number of elements that both Gilgamesh and the flood story in Genesis share:
God decided to send a worldwide flood. This would drown men, women, children, babies and infants, as well as eliminate all of the land animals and birds. God knew of one righteous man, Ut-Napishtim or Noah. God ordered the hero to build a multi-story wooden ark (called a chest or box in the original Hebrew), and the hero initially complained about the assignment to build the boat. The ark would have many compartments, a single door, be sealed with pitch and would house one of every animal species. A great rain covered the land with water. The ark landed on a mountain in the Middle East. The first two birds returned to the ark. The third bird apparently found dry land because it did not return. The hero and his family left the ark, ritually killed an animal, offered it as a sacrifice. The Babylonian gods seemed genuinely sorry for the genocide that they had created. The God of Noah appears to have regretted his actions as well, because he promised never to do it again.
https://danielmiessler.com/blog/the-bible-is-fiction-a-collection-of-evidence/
Did Jesus Exist? By Frank R. Zindler
Frank R. Zindler (born 1939) is an American atheist who served as interim president of the atheist organization American Atheists in 2008.
Another powerful argument against the idea that Mark could have been an eye-witness of the existence of Jesus is based upon the observation that the author of Mark displays a profound lack of familiarity with Palestinian geography. If he had actually lived in Palestine, he would not have made the blunders to be found in his gospel. If he never lived in Palestine, he could not have been an eye-witness of Jesus. You get the point.
The most absurd geographical error Mark commits is when he tells the tall tale about Jesus crossing over the Sea of Galilee and casting demons out of a man (two men in Matthew’s revised version) and making them go into about 2,000 pigs which, as the King James version puts it, “ran violently down a steep place into the sea. and they were choked in the sea.”
Apart from the cruelty to animals displayed by the lovable, gentle Jesus, and his disregard for the property of others, what’s wrong with this story? If your only source of information is the King James Bible, you might not ever know. The King James says this marvel occurred in the land of the Gadarenes, whereas the oldest Greek manuscripts say this miracle took place in the land of the Gerasenes. Luke, who also knew no Palestinian geography, also passes on this bit of absurdity. But Matthew, who had some knowledge of Palestine, changed the name to Gadarene in his new, improved version; but this is further improved to Gergesenes in the King James version.
By now the reader must be dizzy with all the distinctions between Gerasenes, Gadarenes, and Gergesenes. What difference does it make? A lot of difference, as we shall see.
Gerasa, the place mentioned in the oldest manuscripts of Mark, is located about 31 miles from the shore of the Sea of Galilee! Those poor pigs had to run a course five miles longer than a marathon in order to find a place to drown! Not even lemmings have to go that far. Moreover, if one considers a “steep” slope to be at least 45 degrees, that would make the elevation of Gerasa at least six times higher than Mt. Everest!
When the author of Matthew read Mark’s version, he saw the impossibility of Jesus and the gang disembarking at Gerasa (which, by the way, was also in a different country, the so-called Decapolis). Since the only town in the vicinity of the Sea of Galilee that he knew of that started with G was Gadara, he changed Gerasa to Gadara. But even Gadara was five miles from the shore - and in a different country. Later copyists of the Greek manuscripts of all three pig-drowning gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) improved Gadara further to Gergesa, a region now thought to have actually formed part of the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. So much for the trustworthiness of the biblical tradition.
Another example of Mark’s abysmal ignorance of Palestinian geography is found in the story he made up about Jesus traveling from Tyre on the Mediterranean to the Sea of Galilee, 30 miles inland. According to Mark 7:31, Jesus and the boys went by way of Sidon, 20 miles north of Tyre on the Mediterranean coast! Since to Sidon and back would be 40 miles, this means that the wisest of all men walked 70 miles when he could have walked only 30. Of course, one would never know all this from the King James version which - apparently completely ignoring a perfectly clear Greek text - says “Departing from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, he came unto the Sea of Galilee.” Apparently the translators of the King James version also knew their geography. At least they knew more than did the author of Mark!
https://www.atheists.org/activism/resources/did-jesus-exist/
Gospel Geography: Fiction, Fact, and Truth C. C. McCown Source: Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Mar., 1941), pp. 1-25 Published by: The Society of Biblical Literature
There are, indeed, geographical problems connected with the Gospels upon which immense labor has been spent without arriving at any definite conclusions. Some of them, surely, are of little importance, while some which do appear to be of importance will eventually yield to the proper method of attack. Others are insoluble.
The purpose of this survey is to attempt a discrimination between those which are important and those which are not, and between the soluble and insoluble ones, and also to suggest methods of approach to those possible of solution.
A work which has undertaken a most thorough investigation of the geographical data in the synoptic Gospels is Karl Ludwig Schmidt’s Der Rahmen der Geschichte Jesu (Berlin, 1919).
Schmidt began his studies in Deissmann’s New Testament seminar in Berlin in the last semester before the first World War. …
The result is one of the first form-history studies, which treats the Gospels as mere collections of diegeseis, to use Schleiermacher’s term, without any connections except those manufactured by the evangelists out of their own imaginations.
Schmidt concluded that “only now and then, by consideration of the inner character of a story, can we fix its chronological and local situation. In general there is no life of Jesus in the sense of a developing life story, but only single stories, pericopes which are set into a framework.” He modifies this sweeping indictment in the Vorwort (p. vi). It must not be thought that there are no topographical or chronological data. But “taken as a whole, only crumbling fragments of an itinerary can be worked out” of the Gospels. …
In the first Gospel the geographical atmosphere is more unreal and less clear than Mark’s. It appears to have been borrowed from Mark and not to be based upon first-hand knowledge.
The geographical notices of Matthew’s Infancy Narrative have little meaning for the modern student except for their clear proof that the writer believed Jesus to have been born in Bethlehem.
Matthew, the perfect scribe, in the parts he drew from Mark, has apparently followed no consistent course. Sometimes he adds to the geographical notices in order to make them more precise, sometimes he attempts to correct Mark’s data, sometimes he omits. But there is not a single case where it can be plausibly argued that he had data unknown to Mark and to the Second Source or where he has really improved upon Mark.
…
Intentional Changes. Evidently the implication of Mark’s story of the walking on the water, that Jesus and his disciples started for Bethsaida but were driven by the storm to the Plain of Gennesaret, was found objectionable. It implied that Jesus did not succeed in carrying out his intention. Matthew ventures to emend by merely omitting the phrase “towards Bethsaida” rpbs Brqoaai5&v) after “to the other side” (els rb 7rcpav).
This allowed it to be supposed that Gennesaret was on “the other side” from the scene of the miraculous meal-a very simple emendation, which has been responsible for one of two geographical miracles, the modern transfer of the scene of the feast of the five thousand to the eastern shore of the lake, for “when they had crossed over, they came to the land of Gennesaret”
(Matt 14 34=Mk 6 53).7 In a similar way, Luke’s alteration of the account (9 10; cf. v. 12) led to another geographical miracle, the invention (in the modern sense of the English word rather than that of the Latin inventio) of a second Bethsaida on the western shore.8
In another regard Matthew makes a decided alteration in Mark’s account. In relating the story of the “northern journey,” he sends Jesus at once “into the regions of Tyre and Sidon”
(15 2 =Mk 7 37), omitting the later reference to Sidon and the Decapolis. This properly avoids Mark’s lengthy, roundabout journey but introduces a new element of indistinctness and unreality. Jesus returns to the Sea of Galilee, whether on the east or west shore is left undetermined, and immediately goes up “into the mountain” (15 29), and feeds the four thousand “in loneliness” there, not by the lake shore. Then he takes a boat 7 Cf. Dalman, Sacred Sites and Ways, New York, 1935, 171 ff. and sails to Magadan, an unidentified place like Dalmanutha, but in Jewish territory, for there he meets scribes and Pharisees.
Crossing “to the other side” once more (16 5), they come, not to Bethsaida, but immediately into the regions of Caesarea Philippi (16 13). Thus Matthew avoids all mention of Bethsaida, just as Luke (9 18) omits Caesarea Philippi.
Matthew, moreover, is very far from improving on Mark in the story of the last journey. In one sense he betters the account: he makes it smoother and less provocative of questions. Where Mark has Jesus and his disciples come “into a house alone” els oKov … .Kar ‘8tav) for a private conference, Matthew, sensing the probability that the reader will say, ’What house?’, merely drops “into the house” (17 19). He does not have them going “thence through Galilee,” i. e. from this house (Mk 9 30), but, very awkwardly, “gathering together,” (vaTrpepovuowvo), or “returning” (&vaarpespolivwv) in Galilee (17 22). He makes Jesus go into the non-existent “borders of Judea beyond Jordan”
(19 i). He drops out all reference to the fear of the disciples as they approach Jerusalem and to their astonishment at Jesus’ courage, items necessary to explain the situation which led Jesus to take the unusual Jordan-valley route to Jerusalem. Thus in numerous details his omissions sacrifice not only geographical vividness but also accuracy as well as historical clarity, in order to introduce a larger body of teaching materials into the Marcan framework.
His penchant for omissions allows him to make apparent improvements upon Mark in one or two instances, but these editorial successes are more than counterbalanced by errors of judgment. He almost always changes by omission. Where he adds it is only some entirely general or indefinite statement, such as a preaching tour through Galilee or a departure “into the mountain;” something borrowed from Mark and duplicated; or perhaps a mistaken phrase, such as that which turns the ’Arabhah of the Jordan into the Wilderness of Judea. Not a single case of correct, independent, and original addition to Mark’s geography can be ascribed to Matthew.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e174/70153a1276a8c8fc99314465a6c5e0bdb76d.pdf
In the New Testament, there are contradictions between the genealogies of Jesus given in the first chapter of Matthew and the third chapter of Luke.
Both genealogies begin with Jesus’ father, who is identified as Joseph (which is curious, given that Mary was supposedly impregnated by the Holy Ghost). But Matthew says Joseph’s father was Jacob, while Luke claims he was Heli. Matthew lists 26 generations between Jesus and King David, whereas Luke records 41. Matthew runs Jesus’ line of descent through David’s son Solomon, while Luke has it going through David’s son Nathan.
The story of Jesus’ birth is also contradictory. Matthew 2:13-15 depicts Joseph and Mary as fleeing to Egypt with the baby Jesus immediately after the wise men from the east had brought gifts.
But Luke 2:22-40 claims that after the birth of Jesus, his parents remained in Bethlehem for the time of Mary’s purification (which was 40 days, under the Mosaic law). Afterwards, they brought Jesus to Jerusalem “to present him to the Lord,” and then returned to their home in Nazareth. Luke mentions no journey into Egypt or visit by wise men from the east.
Concerning the death of Judas, the disloyal disciple, Matthew 27:5 states he took the money he had received for betraying Jesus, threw it down in the temple, and “went and hanged himself.” To the contrary, Acts 1:18 claims Judas used the money to purchase a field and “falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out.”
In describing Jesus being led to his execution, John 19:17 recounts that he carried his own cross. But Mark 15:21-23 disagrees by saying a man called Simon carried the cross.
As for the crucifixion, Matthew 27:44 tells us Jesus was taunted by both criminals who were being crucified with him. But Luke 23:39-43 relates that only one of the criminals taunted Jesus, the other criminal rebuked the one who was doing the taunting, and Jesus told the criminal who was defending him, “Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.”
Regarding the last words of Jesus while on the cross, Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34 quote Jesus as crying with a loud voice, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Luke 23:46 gives his final words as, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” John 19:30 alleges the last words were, “It is finished.”
There are even contradictions in the accounts of the resurrection - the supposed event that is the very foundation of the Christian religion. Mark 16:2 states that on the day of the resurrection, certain women arrived at the tomb at the rising of the sun. But John 20:1 informs us they arrived when it was yet dark. Luke 24:2 describes the tomb as open when the women arrived, whereas Matthew 28:1-2 indicates it was closed. Mark 16:5 declares that the women saw a young man at the tomb, Luke 24:4 says they saw two men, Matthew 28:2 reports they saw an angel, and John 20:11-12 claims they saw two angels.
Also in the resurrection stories, there are contradictions as to the identity of the women who came to the tomb,[7] whether the men or angels the women saw were inside or outside the tomb,[8] whether the men or angels were standing or sitting,[9] and whether Mary Magdalene recognized the risen Jesus when he first appeared to her.[10]
As a final example of a New Testament contradiction, the conflicting accounts of Paul’s conversion can be cited. Acts 9:7 states that when Jesus called Paul to preach the gospel, the men who were with Paul heard a voice but saw no man. According to Acts 22:9, however, the men saw a light but didn’t hear the voice speaking to Paul.
The foregoing examples are just a few of the hundreds of contradictions contained in the Old and New Testaments. Each contradiction is an instance where at least one of the verses is wrong. Thus, hundreds of contradictions mean there are at least hundreds of incorrect statements in the Bible.
https://americanhumanist.org/what-is-humanism/reasons-humanists-reject-bible/
The Bible: History or Myth?
The Bible itself is full of inconsistencies. How can it be an accurate historical record, when the various books contradict each other? Here is UNC Religion Professor Bart Ehrman: “Just take the death of Jesus. What day did Jesus die on and what time of day? Did he die on the day before the Passover meal was eaten, as John explicitly says, or did he die after it was eaten, as Mark explicitly says? Did he die at noon, as in John, or at 9 a.m., as in Mark? Did Jesus carry his cross the entire way himself or did Simon of Cyrene carry his cross? It depends which Gospel you read. Did both robbers mock Jesus on the cross or did only one of them mock him and the other come to his defense? It depends which Gospel you read. Did the curtain in the temple rip in half before Jesus died or after he died? It depends which Gospel you read … Or take the accounts of the resurrection. Who went to the tomb on the third day? Was it Mary alone or was it Mary with other women? If it was Mary with other women, how many other women were there, which ones were they, and what were their names? Was the stone rolled away before they got there or not? What did they see in the tomb? Did they see a man, did they see two men, or did they see an angel? It depends which account you read.”
Reading the Bible as mythology is not a new concept. Two of the early Church Fathers, Origen (185-254 AD) and Augustine (354-430 AD), both interpreted Genesis metaphorically, rejecting literal interpretations. Early in the 20th century, German theologian Rudolf Bultmann called for a “demythologizing” of the New Testament for many of the reasons given above. Rather, the movement in many fundamentalist circles today to read the Bible as inerrant (an extreme form of literalism, in which every word of Bible is viewed as true) is a late development from the 19th century as a response to the chipping away at the historicity of the stories since the Enlightenment.
I fear that an insistence on a literal or historical reading of the Bible will ultimately lead to the irrelevance of Christianity in our society.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-small/mythology-and-the-bible_b_898253.html
Jesus’s Story is an Obvious Rehashing Of Numerous Previous Characters Perhaps even more compelling is the story of Christ himself. As it turns out it’s not even remotely original. It is instead nothing more than a collection of bits and pieces from dozens of other stories that came long before. Here are some examples.
https://danielmiessler.com/blog/the-bible-is-fiction-a-collection-of-evidence/
Five myths about Jesus By Reza Aslan
Reza Aslan is an Iranian-American author, public intellectual, religious studies scholar, producer, and television host. He has written three books on religion: No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization,[2] and Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. Aslan is a member of the American Academy of Religion, the Society of Biblical Literature, and the International Qur’anic Studies Association.
Perhaps no historical figure is more deeply mired in legend and myth than Jesus of Nazareth. Outside of the Gospels - which are not so much factual accounts of Jesus but arguments about His religious significance - there is almost no trace of this simple Galilean peasant who inspired the world’s largest religion. But there’s enough biblical scholarship about the historical Jesus to raise questions about some of the myths that have formed around Him over the past 2,000 years.
The first Christians seem to have had little interest in Jesus’s early years. Stories about His birth and childhood are conspicuously absent in the earliest written documents about Him: the letters of Paul (written between A.D. 50 and 60) and the Gospel of Mark (written after A.D. 70). But as interest in the person of Jesus increased, the nascent Christian community tried to fill in the gaps of His youth to align His life and mission with the myriad, and often conflicting, prophecies about the messiah in the Hebrew scriptures.
One of those prophecies requires the messiah, as a descendant of King David, to be born in David’s city: Bethlehem. But Jesus was so identified with Nazareth, the city where most scholars believe He was born, that He was known throughout his life as “the Nazarene.” The early Christians needed a creative solution to get Jesus’s parents to Bethlehem so He could be born in the same city as David.
For the evangelist Luke, the answer lay in a census called by Rome in A.D. 6, which he claims required every subject to travel to his ancestral home to be counted. Since Jesus’s father, Joseph, was from Bethlehem, he and his wife, Mary, left Nazareth for the city of David, where Jesus was born. And thus the prophecy was fulfilled.
Yet this Roman census encompassed only Judea, Samaria and Idumea - not Galilee, where Jesus’s family lived. What’s more, since the purpose of a census was taxation, Roman law assessed an individual’s property in the place of his residence, not his birthplace.
Simply put, Luke places Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem not because it took place there but because that story fulfills the words of the prophet Micah: “But you Bethlehem .???.???. from you shall come for me a ruler in Israel.”
Despite the Catholic doctrine of His mother Mary’s perpetual virginity, we can be certain that the historical Jesus came from a large family with at least four brothers who are named in the Gospels - James, Joseph, Simon and Judas - and an unknown number of sisters. That Jesus had brothers and sisters is attested to repeatedly by the Gospels and the letters of Paul. Even the 1st-century Jewish historian Josephus refers to Jesus’s brother James, who would become the most important leader of the early Christian church after Jesus’s death.
Some Catholic theologians have argued that the Greek word the Gospels use to describe Jesus’s brothers - “adelphos” - could also mean “cousins” or “step-brothers,” and that these could be Joseph’s children from a previous marriage. While that may be true, nowhere in the New Testament is “adelphos” used to mean anything other than “brother.” So there is no rational argument for viewing Jesus as an only child.
This myth is based on a misunderstanding of the three categories of Jesus’s followers. The first was made up of those who came to hear Him speak or to be healed by Him whenever He entered a village or town. The Gospels refer to this group as “crowds.”
The second category was composed of those who followed Jesus from town to town, village to village. These were called disciples, and according to the Gospel of Luke, there were 70 or 72 of them, depending on which version of the text you believe.
The third category of Jesus’s followers was known as the apostles. These 12 men were no mere disciples, for they did not just follow Jesus from one place to another. Rather, they were given permission to go off on their own and preach His message independently and without supervision. They were, in other words, the chief missionaries of the Jesus movement.
The Gospels portray Pontius Pilate as an honest but weak-willed governor who was strong-armed by the Jewish authorities into sending a man he knew was innocent to the cross. The Pilate of history, however, was renowned for sending his troops onto the streets of Jerusalem to slaughter Jews whenever they disagreed with even the slightest of his decisions. In his 10 years as governor of Jerusalem, Pilate eagerly, and without trial, sent thousands to the cross, and the Jews lodged a complaint against him with the Roman emperor. Jews generally did not receive Roman trials, let alone Jews accused of rebellion. So the notion that Pilate would spend a moment of his time pondering the fate of yet another Jewish rabble-rouser, let alone grant him a personal audience, beggars the imagination.
It is, of course, conceivable that Jesus would have received an audience with the Roman governor if the magnitude of His crime warranted special attention. But any “trial” Jesus got would have been brief and perfunctory, its sole purpose to officially record the charges for which He was being executed.
The Gospels say that after the crucifixion, Jesus’s body was brought down from the cross and placed in a tomb. If that were true, it would have been because of an extremely unusual, perhaps unprecedented, act of benevolence on the part of the Romans.
Crucifixion was not just a form of capital punishment for Rome. In fact, some criminals were first executed and then nailed to a cross. The primary purpose of crucifixion was to deter rebellion; that’s why it was always carried out in public. It was also why the criminal was always left hanging long after he died; the crucified were almost never buried. Because the point of crucifixion was to humiliate the victim and frighten witnesses, the corpse would be left to be eaten by dogs and picked clean by birds of prey. The bones would then be thrown onto a trash heap, which is how Golgotha, the place of Jesus’s crucifixion, earned its name: the place of skulls.
It is possible that, unlike practically every other criminal crucified by Rome, Jesus was brought down from the cross and placed in an extravagant rock-hewn tomb fit for the wealthiest men in Judea. But it is not very likely.
Did historical Jesus really exist? The evidence just doesn’t add up. There are clearly good reasons to doubt Jesus’ historical existence.
Raphael Lataster is a lecturer in religious studies at the University of Sydney. He is author of There Was No Jesus, There Is No God.
Numerous secular scholars have presented their own versions of the so-called “Historical Jesus” - and most of them are, as biblical scholar J.D. Crossan puts it, “an academic embarrassment.” From Crossan’s view of Jesus as the wise sage, to Robert Eisenman’s Jesus the revolutionary, and Bart Ehrman’s apocalyptic prophet, about the only thing New Testament scholars seem to agree on is Jesus’ historical existence. But can even that be questioned?
The first problem we encounter when trying to discover more about the Historical Jesus is the lack of early sources. The earliest sources only reference the clearly fictional Christ of Faith. These early sources, compiled decades after the alleged events, all stem from Christian authors eager to promote Christianity - which gives us reason to question them. The authors of the Gospels fail to name themselves, describe their qualifications, or show any criticism with their foundational sources - which they also fail to identify. Filled with mythical and non-historical information, and heavily edited over time, the Gospels certainly should not convince critics to trust even the more mundane claims made therein.
The methods traditionally used to tease out rare nuggets of truth from the Gospels are dubious. The criterion of embarrassment says that if a section would be embarrassing for the author, it is more likely authentic. Unfortunately, given the diverse nature of Christianity and Judaism back then (things have not changed all that much), and the anonymity of the authors, it is impossible to determine what truly would be embarrassing or counter-intuitive, let alone if that might not serve some evangelistic purpose.
The criterion of Aramaic context is similarly unhelpful. Jesus and his closest followers were surely not the only Aramaic-speakers in first-century Judea. The criterion of multiple independent attestation can also hardly be used properly here, given that the sources clearly are not independent.
Paul’s Epistles, written earlier than the Gospels, give us no reason to dogmatically declare Jesus must have existed. Avoiding Jesus’ earthly events and teachings, even when the latter could have bolstered his own claims, Paul only describes his “Heavenly Jesus.” Even when discussing what appear to be the resurrection and the last supper, his only stated sources are his direct revelations from the Lord, and his indirect revelations from the Old Testament. In fact, Paul actually rules out human sources (see Galatians 1:11-12).
Also important are the sources we don’t have. There are no existing eyewitness or contemporary accounts of Jesus. All we have are later descriptions of Jesus’ life events by non-eyewitnesses, most of whom are obviously biased. Little can be gleaned from the few non-Biblical and non-Christian sources, with only Roman scholar Josephus and historian Tacitus having any reasonable claim to be writing about Jesus within 100 years of his life. And even those sparse accounts are shrouded in controversy, with disagreements over what parts have obviously been changed by Christian scribes (the manuscripts were preserved by Christians), the fact that both these authors were born after Jesus died (they would thus have probably received this information from Christians), and the oddity that centuries go by before Christian apologists start referencing them.
In sum, there are clearly good reasons to doubt Jesus’ historical existence - if not to think it outright improbable.
Who Was Jesus? Fingerprints of the Christ by Acharya S aka D.M. Murdock
Acharya S is a scholar classically educated in archaeology, history, mythology and languages. Acharya specializes in religion and mythology, critiquing and comparing them, and providing unique insights into their origins.
Who Was Jesus? is specifically designed for Christians and uses mainly Christian texts and authorities. It starts out recounting the story of Christ found mostly in Matthew, followed by a short discussion of each of the other gospels, where they meet and diverge from each other. Next, I discuss the concept of “textual harmonization” as well as the gospel dates, revealing that the gospels are a mass of “variant readings” and that their authorship and dates are uncertain. I also delve into some Old Testament “prefiguring” and “prophecies,” providing all-new, original side-by-side charts. Next come many reasons why people do not believe the story of Jesus Christ, along with the standard apologies for such objections and a chapter discussing whether or not the gospel story is history or propaganda. Finally there is a conclusion reminding the readers how much of our future rests upon this issue and how it should not be taken lightly.
http://www.stellarhousepublishing.com/whowasjesus1.html
The Bible is Fiction: A Collection Of Evidence
The Census: The authors of the Bible are trying so hard to get Jesus born in Bethlehem that they craft a story about a census. They say that Joseph had to travel back to his father’s homeland in order to register for it. Can you seriously imagine-in any period let alone then-asking the entire country to travel back their father’s hometown to register for a census? It’s completely impossible. The author of the story put it in there because they needed Jesus born in that city. Plus, historians note that the Romans kept extraordinary records, and there wasn’t even a census at that time. It’s completely fabricated, and for obvious reasons.
https://danielmiessler.com/blog/the-bible-is-fiction-a-collection-of-evidence/
Matt Dillahunty on the historicity of Jesus and miracles
The facts are these - there are no contemporary extrabiblical accounts of any events specific to the life of Jesus. That means no independent sources from any eyewitnesses with regard to his birth, life, miracles, ministry, death or proposed resurrection. The gospels are anonymous; we have no original manuscripts; they do not agree on details; they do not agree with recorded history; and the consensus of New Testament scholarship is that none of them were written by eyewitnesses. The bible has stories about eyewitnesses, but we don’t have a single comment from anyone claiming to be an eyewitness.
The process of canonization included books that doctrinally agreed with those in power, and eliminated and attempted to destroy books that were considered heretical by those in power. Yet those same books were considered inspired by other sects. Books like Revelations barely made it into the bible as many considered them uninspired. Books like the Shepherd of Hermas and the Apocolypse of Peter which have traditionally been considered divinely inspired were excluded. Paul’s epistles, some of which are of questionable authorship, were the first books of the New Testament to be written, and that was decades after the purported life of Jesus. The gospels were written many years later - perhaps even decades later - by unknown authors. Historians from the late first and second century do mention Christians and some refer to Jesus, but none of these were eyewitnesses, and most of them couldn’t even have spoken to someone who claimed to be an eyewitness.
So we have the Bible, a collection of stories by largely unknown authors who were unlikely to be eyewitnesses and we don’t have originals of their work. We have copies of copies of copies of translations of copies of copies of anonymous books reporting an oral tradition passed down for decades or centuries after the purported events in a time when myths, superstitions, and god-men claims were plentiful; during a time when fact-checking and literacy were rare; and when doctrinal wars prompted forged documents (Paul even mentions this in the bible) in order to prop up competing theologies as orthodox or heretical. And for my money, that means none of it is believable.
The Bible: No Sir, That’s Not History by Rev. David Bokovoy
David Bokovoy holds a PhD in Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East and an MA in Jewish Studies both from Brandeis University. He is currently the online professor in Bible and Jewish Studies at Utah State University. David has published articles on the Hebrew Bible in a variety of academic venues including the Journal of Biblical Literature, Vetus Testamentum, Studies in the Bible and Antiquity. His academic focus is on source criticism, historical Jesus studies, the Divine Council, and sexual imagery connected with divinities in Near Eastern and biblical traditions.
Chronicles refers to a total of fifteen books that it claims to use as its sources. While some scholars believe that these “records” actually existed, others suggest that they were simply made up by the author as a type of false footnoting system to give readers the impression that the account contains verisimilitude, meaning the appearance of a real “history.”
But the book itself is far from real history as we know it. For example, we know that the Chronicler fabricated genealogies to solve problems in his sources (see, for example, 5:29-33). In his reformulation of the story in Kings, the Chronicler simply omitted portions of David’s “history” that the author didn’t want to convey, such as the infamous Bathsheba episode and Ammon’s rape of David’s daughter. Would a good “historian” have done that? These events were simply omitted because the Chronicler wasn’t a historian trying to depict the past. He left out events that did not accord with his very specific theological agenda (something that good historians don’t do).
It’s important to remember that we actually have the Chronicler’s primary source for his “history” in the book of Kings. We can document that the Chronicler changes the narrative “history” he received and invented stories that explain his new theological views, like, for instance, the presentation of Manasseh as a model penitent (2 Chron 22:11-16). This fabricated account (not depicted in Kings) allowed the Chronicler to explain what he felt was significantly problematic about the earlier biblical record, namely that God destroyed the kingdom of Judah because of Manasseh’s wickedness. The Chronicler’s theology was very, VERY different from that which appears in Kings, so the Chronicler had to produce a “historical narrative” that explained why God didn’t destroy the southern kingdom during Manasseh’s day. You see, the Babylonian destruction in 586 BCE works in Kings because Kings accepts the concept of transgenerational punishment (remember, God holds the children of the third and fourth generation responsible for the sins of their fathers, see Ex. 20:5), so Judah, from this perspective, could be destroyed for Manasseh’s sins long after he died. But the Chronicler rejected this earlier biblical theology and created a story to explain why God didn’t destroy the kingdom during Manasseh’s reign. Well, it’s because Manasseh repented.
The problem is, however, that this repentance never happened. Not only is it not found in Kings, but Manasseh was a vassal of Assyria, not Babylon. Written long after the Assyrian empire in Manasseh’s day, Chronicles states that like the Jews of the later Babylonian exile (whose story the Chronicler was very familiar with), Manasseh was taken captive into Babylon (1 Chron 33:11), where as a result of his repentance, he (once again, like the later Jewish community) returned from Babylonian captivity.
So, yes, Chronicles cites sources, and yes, Chronicles has some long boring genealogies, but it’s filled with fabricated history. This fact has led Marc Brettler to explain:
“To many, this way of looking at Scripture may be offensive, but we must remember that the recollection of historical traditions in this period was different than it is now. There was little interest in history for its own sake, that is, for what it taught about the real past. History mattered because of what it taught about the present, including the legitimacy of the main priestly clan.” (4)
In terms of history and historiography, I’ve really only scratched the surface with this post. The fact is that the evidence goes on and on. Biblical authors were NOT historians, at least not in the modern sense of the term. They were storytellers. Their accounts were certainly sacred, but they were also entertaining, and sometimes even political and crude.
Biblical stories tell us something about the way their respective authors understood the past, but they don’t always tell us something about “the” past. The original authors who produced the Bible created stories about prophets, kings, and heroic warriors that were carefully crafted to teach valuable ideas concerning divinity and its relationship to humanity, especially the family of Israel.
It’s important for modern readers of the Bible to recognize that biblical authors were not motivated to write their accounts out of antiquarian interest. For these authors, the past was far too important as a political and religious tool to simply recount what really happened. Instead, biblical authors used historical narrative to covey themes concerning the God of Israel and his relationship to his chosen people.
Fourteen Generations: 490 Years: An Explanation of the Genealogy of Jesus
“The fourteen generations of the kingdom are strikingly at variance with the record of succesion in the Book of Kings -”Why did he skip three kings?" asks Chrysostom, and commentators and apologists have exercised themselves on the question ever since.
The omission of the three kings is by no means the only discrepancy between the geneology in Matthews and its sources; but it has always been recognized as the gravest, for the kings thus passed over are not obscure or ephemeral rulers. …
Taken in connection with the previous omission of the three kings, it is more probably to be attributed to the same intention, namely to make the period of the monarchy fall within exactly fourteen generations, like that which preceded it.
Mere love of symmetry can hardly have been the sole motive for so violent a curtailment of the history; it is more likely that the number fourteen had an intrinsic significance for the author and a decisive importance for his purpose in compiling the geneology.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1507663?seq=3#page_scan_tab_contents
Jesus’s Heritage: There are two different genealogies for Jesus given in the Bible, and they don’t match. One is curiously given through Joseph, which is strange since he’s not Jesus’s father. Why give a genealogy through someone who isn’t related to you?
https://danielmiessler.com/blog/the-bible-is-fiction-a-collection-of-evidence/
The Fabrication of Jesus Christ - Christopher Hitchens https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQw9sNmNEeA
Who Wrote The Bible and Why It Matters By Bart D. Ehrman
Bart D. Ehrman is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the New York Times bestselling author of ‘Misquoting Jesus’ and ‘Jesus, Interrupted’. His latest book, ‘Forged: Writing in the Name of God - Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are’, is now available from HarperOne.
Apart from the most rabid fundamentalists among us, nearly everyone admits that the Bible might contain errors - a faulty creation story here, a historical mistake there, a contradiction or two in some other place. But is it possible that the problem is worse than that - that the Bible actually contains lies?
Most people wouldn’t put it that way, since the Bible is, after all, sacred Scripture for millions on our planet. But good Christian scholars of the Bible, including the top Protestant and Catholic scholars of America, will tell you that the Bible is full of lies, even if they refuse to use the term. And here is the truth: Many of the books of the New Testament were written by people who lied about their identity, claiming to be a famous apostle - Peter, Paul or James - knowing full well they were someone else. In modern parlance, that is a lie, and a book written by someone who lies about his identity is a forgery.
Most modern scholars of the Bible shy away from these terms, and for understandable reasons, some having to do with their clientele. Teaching in Christian seminaries, or to largely Christian undergraduate populations, who wants to denigrate the cherished texts of Scripture by calling them forgeries built on lies? And so scholars use a different term for this phenomenon and call such books “pseudepigrapha.”
You will find this antiseptic term throughout the writings of modern scholars of the Bible. It’s the term used in university classes on the New Testament, and in seminary courses, and in Ph.D. seminars. What the people who use the term do not tell you is that it literally means “writing that is inscribed with a lie.”
And that’s what such writings are. Whoever wrote the New Testament book of 2 Peter claimed to be Peter. But scholars everywhere - except for our friends among the fundamentalists - will tell you that there is no way on God’s green earth that Peter wrote the book. Someone else wrote it claiming to be Peter. Scholars may also tell you that it was an acceptable practice in the ancient world for someone to write a book in the name of someone else. But that is where they are wrong. If you look at what ancient people actually said about the practice, you’ll see that they invariably called it lying and condemned it as a deceitful practice, even in Christian circles. 2 Peter was finally accepted into the New Testament because the church fathers, centuries later, were convinced that Peter wrote it. But he didn’t. Someone else did. And that someone else lied about his identity.
The same is true of many of the letters allegedly written by Paul. Most scholars will tell you that whereas seven of the 13 letters that go under Paul’s name are his, the other six are not. Their authors merely claimed to be Paul. In the ancient world, books like that were labeled as pseudoi - lies.
This may all seem like a bit of antiquarian curiosity, especially for people whose lives don’t depend on the Bible or even people of faith for whom biblical matters are a peripheral interest at best. But in fact, it matters sometimes. Whoever wrote the book of 1 Timothy claimed to be Paul. But he was lying about that - he was someone else living after Paul had died. In his book, the author of 1 Timothy used Paul’s name and authority to address a problem that he saw in the church. Women were speaking out, exercising authority and teaching men. That had to stop. The author told women to be silent and submissive, and reminded his readers about what happened the first time a woman was allowed to exercise authority over a man, in that little incident in the garden of Eden. No, the author argued, if women wanted to be saved, they were to have babies (1 Tim. 2:11-15).
Largely on the basis of this passage, the apostle Paul has been branded, by more liberation minded people of recent generations, as one of history’s great misogynists. The problem, of course, is that Paul never said any such thing. And why does it matter? Because the passage is still used by church leaders today to oppress and silence women. Why are there no women priests in the Catholic Church? Why are women not allowed to preach in conservative evangelical churches? Why are there churches today that do not allow women even to speak? In no small measure it is because Paul allegedly taught that women had to be silent, submissive and pregnant. Except that the person who taught this was not Paul, but someone lying about his identity so that his readers would think he was Paul.
It may be one of the greatest ironies of the Christian scriptures that some of them insist on truth, while telling a lie. For no author is truth more important than for the “Paul” of Ephesians. He refers to the gospel as “the word of truth” (1:13); he indicates that the “truth is in Jesus”; he tells his readers to “speak the truth” to their neighbors (4:24-25); and he instructs his readers to “fasten the belt of truth around your waist” (6:14). And yet he himself lied about who he was. He was not really Paul.
It appears that some of the New Testament writers, such as the authors of 2 Peter, 1 Timothy and Ephesians, felt they were perfectly justified to lie in order to tell the truth. But we today can at least evaluate their claims and realize just how human, and fallible, they were. They were creatures of their time and place. And so too were their teachings, lies and all.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/bart-d-ehrman/the-bible-telling-lies-to_b_840301.html
Randel Helms argues that the books of the Bible were written for and against different points of view-that the Bible’s authors were often motivated to write because they wanted to challenge or correct those who had written before them. So, for example, Paul said that he opposed Peter because he felt that Peter was clearly in the wrong (Galatians 1 and 2). Helms notes that Jeremiah condemned the entire religious establishment, that the prophets and priests were frauds, every one of them (Jeremiah 8:10). Luke felt the need to write another gospel even though other writers had already drawn up their own account of events (Luke 1:1). Luke felt that Mark’s gospel was filled with errors and edited it freely, even the words of the dying Christ were not left unaltered.[12]
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The study of inconsistencies in the Bible has a long history. In the 17th century, Spinoza considered the Bible to be, “…a book rich in contradictions.”[38] In the 18th century, Thomas Paine in The Age of Reason compiled many of the Bible’s self-contradictions. And in 1860, William Henry Burr produced a list of 144 self-contradictions in the Bible.[39]
Biblical scholars have studied inconsistencies in and between texts and canons as a means to study the bible and the societies that created and influenced it. The field has been given rise to theories such as Wellhausen’s[40] documentary hypothesis and the Deuteronomistic history (concerning the origins of the Torah and the history of Israel contained in the books from Joshua to Kings respectively),[41] and similar theories to explain why the Synoptic Gospels disagree with each other, and with the Gospel of John.
In the Middle Ages, Muslim scholars such as Ibn Hazm, al-Qurtubi, al-Maqrizi, Ibn Taymiyyah, Ibn al-Qayyim,[31] based on their interpretation of Qur’anic and other traditions,[32] maintained that Jews and Christians had tampered with the scriptures, a concept known as tahrif.
The theme of tahrif was first explored in the writings of Ibn Hazm (10th century), who rejected claims of Mosaic authorship and posited that Ezra was the author of the Torah. His arguments against the authenticity of the biblical text in both the Tanakh and New Testament included chronological and geographical inaccuracies and contradictions; what he considered theological impossibilities (anthropomorphic expressions, stories of extramarital sex, and the attributing of sins to prophets), as well as what he saw as a lack of reliable transmission (tawatur) of the text. He argued that the falsification of the Torah could have taken place while there existed only one copy kept by the Aaronic priesthood of the Temple in Jerusalem. Ibn Hazm’s arguments had a major impact upon Muslim literature and scholars, and these and other polemical ideas were modified only slightly by some later authors.[33][34][35]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_consistency_of_the_Bible
Story of Jesus Christ was ‘fabricated to pacify the poor’, claims controversial Biblical scholar Christianity was a sophisticated government propaganda exercise used to pacify the subjects of a the Roman Empire, claims scholar
Joseph Atwill, who is the author of a book entitled ‘Caesar’s Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus’, asserts that Christianity did not begin as a religion, but was actually a sophisticated government propaganda exercise used to pacify the subjects of the Roman Empire.
At the ‘Covert Messiah’ conference, to be held at the Conway Hall in Holborn a week on Saturday, Mr Atwill will present his theory that the New Testament was written by first-century Roman aristocrats and that they entirely fabricated the story of Jesus Christ.
Outlining his ideas in a blog posting on his website Mr Atwill writes: “Christianity may be considered a religion, but it was actually developed and used as a system of mind control to produce slaves that believed God decreed their slavery.”
Mr Atwill says that acts of insurrection by Jewish sects, who were awaiting the arrival of a so-called ‘warrior Messiah’ in Palestine, were a perpetual problem for the Roman Empire and that after the Empire had exhausted all traditional means of dealing with the problem they resorted to psychological warfare.
“They surmised that the way to stop the spread of zealous Jewish missionary activity was to create a competing belief system,” Atwill told PRWeb.com
“That’s when the ‘peaceful’ Messiah story was invented.
“Instead of inspiring warfare, this Messiah urged turn-the-other-cheek pacifism and encouraged Jews to ‘give onto Caesar’ and pay their taxes to Rome.”
Mr Atwill continues: “Although Christianity can be a comfort to some, it can also be very damaging and repressive, an insidious form of mind control that has led to blind acceptance of serfdom, poverty, and war throughout history.
To this day, especially in the United States, it is used to create support for war in the Middle East."
Elsewhere, Mr Atwill also writes: “In fact he [Jesus] may be the only fictional character in literature whose entire life story can be traced to other sources. Once those sources are all laid bare, there’s simply nothing left.”
Atwill says he made his discovery when while studying the New Testament alongside the ‘War of the Jews’ by Josephus - the only surviving first-person historical account of first-century Judea.
Mr Atwill claims that he began to notice a sequence of parallels between the two texts.
“What seems to have eluded many scholars is that the sequence of events and locations of Jesus ministry are more or less the same as the sequence of events and locations of the military campaign of [Emperor] Titus Flavius as described by Josephus,” Atwill claims.
“This is clear evidence of a deliberately constructed pattern”, he continues.
“The biography of Jesus is actually constructed, tip to stern, on prior stories, but especially on the biography of a Roman Caesar.”
Holes in History Jerry de Gier Peter Nathan
In reviewing three books on this subject, it is important to note that none of the authors considers himself to be deeply religious with a belief that has to be protected. William Dever nonetheless approaches archaeology with a missionary zeal. He has given deep thought to the philosophical underpinnings of the subject. Israel Finkelstein is a leading Israeli archaeologist whom Dever would classify as a revisionist or minimalist because he contends that the Bible is a late invention of Hellenistic Jews. David Rohl, on the other hand, is clearly a maximalist-one who believes that archaeology can largely support the historical record of the Bible.
In many Western nations the Bible has provided the foundation for society and civility. But its historical accuracy and its value as a source of truth are increasingly coming under fire. Fanning most of the critical flames are minimalists and revisionists.
… Dever’s conclusions are hard to ignore. He believes that while the Hebrew Bible is not “history” in the modern sense, it nevertheless contains the outline, as well as many details, of a real “ancient Israel” in the Iron Age. He goes on to say that we should separate theology, religion and morality, and realize that they are not one and the same. The biblical writers are making statements based on faith, he says. We must remember that the Bible’s main thrust isn’t as much about the story or about historicity as it is about the major player: God. “The real question,” Dever states, “is whether the faith of the writers of the Hebrew Bible can any longer be ours. For some it can be; for others not.” Dever notes that for fundamentalists, either Christian or Jewish, it is a trying thing to dig up what could be evidence against their faith. If the Bible is not proved 100 percent accurate, such people can find themselves questioning how “such a fraudulent literature [can] be the basis for any system of belief, morality, or cultural value.” …
http://www.vision.org/visionmedia/reviews/archaeology-and-the-bible/407.aspx
Council of Nicaea, (325), the first ecumenical council of the Christian church, meeting in ancient Nicaea (now Iznik, Turkey). It was called by the emperor Constantine I, an unbaptized catechumen, or neophyte, who presided over the opening session and took part in the discussions. He hoped a general council of the church would solve the problem created in the Eastern church by Arianism, a heresy first proposed by Arius of Alexandria that affirmed that Christ is not divine but a created being. Pope Sylvester I did not attend the council but was represented by legates.
The council condemned Arius and, with reluctance on the part of some, incorporated the nonscriptural word homoousios (“of one substance”) into a creed (the Nicene Creed) to signify the absolute equality of the Son with the Father. The emperor then exiled Arius, an act that, while manifesting a solidarity of church and state, underscored the importance of secular patronage in ecclesiastical affairs.
The council also attempted but failed to establish a uniform date for Easter. But it issued decrees on many other matters, including the proper method of consecrating bishops, a condemnation of lending money at interest by clerics, and a refusal to allow bishops, priests, and deacons to move from one church to another
https://www.britannica.com/event/Council-of-Nicaea-Christianity-325
Some historians argue that Constantine’s “faith” was entirely politicised and not based on inner conviction. They argue that Constantine initiated a shift in relations between Christianity and the state, transforming it into an organ of power just as Roman religion had been used. More radically, it can be argued that Constantine began a process whereby Christianity could be used to legitimise the Roman Empire much like Europe in the Middle Ages was dominated by the unifying idea and indeed superstructure known as Christendom. This view may be a little extreme as Constantine may well have had an inner conviction for his Christian faith rather than a purely political motivation.
Nevertheless, the point remains, from a political and economic perspective in Judea; and the wider social-political implications across the Empire, Constantine’s conversion to Christianity certainly appeared to benefit the empire and Constantine’s personal power. Having said that, the conversion to Christianity was not universally accepted by any means, as I implied with the Roman elites. At the level of the general population divisions and conflicts were widespread. Ultimately Christianity came to dominate in the Roman Empire and despite its initial divisiveness came to provide a unifying force across Europe as individual kingdoms rose out of the fall of the Roman Empire.
Lost Christianities and Banned Books of the Bible
Rev. Dr. Carl Gregg is a trained spiritual director, a D.Min. graduate of San Francisco Theological Seminary, and the minister of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Frederick, Maryland.
The part of the Nicene Creed that I find most problematic is the part that Jesus “came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary, and was made man; and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried.” Do you notice what is missing? What’s missing is Jesus’ entire life: his teachings, his public ministry, his radical acts - all the parts that to me are most significant, meaningful, and challenging.
And what’s interesting about that omission from the Nicene Creed is that there are also “Lost Christianities” that emphasized Jesus’ teachings as the most central and important part, represented most emblematically by The Gospel of Thomas. To back up one step, some of you may have heard about “The Q Gospel.” “Q” is short for the German word Quelle, which means “source.” “Q” is a hypothetical document that scholars began speculating about more than a century ago based on a close analysis of the canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
To make a long story short, the reigning theory is that both authors of both Matthew and Luke independently had a copy of Mark on their desk when they were writing. But that Matthew and Luke didn’t know each other’s work. There are, however, 200 verses that Matthew and Luke share almost verbatim, and those verse are hypothesized to be from a shared written source that was available to both Matthew and Luke, but is now lost to the vagaries of history. German scholars called that hypothetical source Quelle, and American scholars call it “Q” for short. So, the theory goes that both Matthew and Luke independently had two sources on their respective desks (Mark and Q), giving this theory its name: “The Two-Source Hypothesis.”
For decades the primary objection to this theory was that it presupposed the existence of a genre (a “sayings” source) for which there was no historical evidence. The argument went that early Christians wrote letters (called “epistles”), apocalyptic literature (like “Revelation”), epics (like “Acts”), and narratives about Jesus (called “Gospels”) - but they didn’t just write lists of 200 sayings of Jesus without any reference to his death and resurrection, which is what Q was hypothesized to be.
Then the Gospel of Thomas was discovered in 1945 in Nag Hammadi (remote Upper Egypt) in a find that Ehrman and others have called the “most significant collection of lost Christian writings to turn up in modern times.” And the Gospel of Thomas - although not the Lost Gospel of Q - was precisely the genre that scholars had predicted Q to be: a sayings Gospel. Thomas is a Gospel that has nothing about Jesus’ life, miracles, death, or resurrection; instead, it is simply 113 sayings of Jesus. And the early Christian community that produced Thomas - as well as perhaps the community that produced the “Q Gospel” - are strong evidence of Lost Christianities that cared deeply about Jesus’ teachings, but did not share the proto-orthodox emphasis on certain interpretations of his death and resurrection.
One theory is that the Nag Hammadi library was buried in the late fourth-century in response to the proto-orthodox’s increasing persecution of individuals, groups, and texts they viewed as heretical. Keep in mind that the Council of Nicea in 325 CE produced the Nicene Creed to help regulate and eliminate theological diversity. But the Council of Nicea did not make a ruling about what books would be canonized into an anthology that we would come to know as the Bible.
Indeed, in 367, four decades after the Council of Nicea, is the first time we have a historical record of the 27 books known today as the New Testament in the order that we find them today with no other books added or missing. That list is from a letter from Athanasius of Alexandria (the same Bishop Athanasius that led the charge against the “heretical” views of Arius at the Council of Nicea) that was written to all of the congregations over which Athanasius was bishop. And it may have been in response to that 367 CE letter than a monk at a monastery near Nag Hammadi buried the now banned books to keep them from being burned and destroy. Astoundingly those banned books remained undisturbed for approximately 1,500 years before being rediscovered in the mid-20th century. And suddenly, we were able to read what those Lost Christianities said about themselves instead of only having what their opponents (the proto-orthodox) said about them.
Importantly, that 367 CE letter, which limited the books orthodox Christians were officially permitted to read was only applicable to the congregations in Athanasius’ jurisdiction as bishop. And although there was a growing census about which books were in and out, there was no official ruling until the Reformation at the Council of Trent in the mid-1500s. Similarly, I will note briefly that the official contents of the Tanakh, the “Jewish Bible” was not settled until the early 3rd century. In Jesus’ day, for example, you hear about not the full Tanakh (or Christian “Old Testament”) that we have today, but about the “Torah and the Prophets,” only 2/3s of the today’s Hebrew Scriptures, because the rest was still under dispute or still coming into final form.
There is, of course, much more to say. I would love to share more with you about The Gospel of Peter, which before being banned, was arguably at least as popular as the Gospel of Mark in that we have three times as many surviving manuscripts of the Gospel of Peter as we do of Mark. And Peter’s Gospel includes some fantastic scenes than include a giant Jesus (whose is so extraordinarily tall that his head reaches the clouds) as well as actual words being spoken by the cross on which Jesus is crucified.(And although these scenes may strike us as unbelievably odd, that may be do principally to their unfamiliarity. Are they really that different in kind from the most familiar - but still fantastical - claims found in the canonical scriptures?)
Or consider the Acts of Paul and Thecla, which tells us about the incredibly popular and well known stories of the female preacher and teacher of Thecla in early Christianity.
And to name only one more, one of my personal favorites of these Lost Christian documents is the Infancy Gospel of Thomas produced by early Christians who wondered about what Jesus must have been like as a child. And there are some wild stores of what Jesus was like as a child.
For now, allow me to conclude with a few thoughts on the significance for twenty-first century religious progressives of these “Lost Christianities and Banned Books of the Bible.” The most important point may be that there never was a simple beginning in which all you needed to do was believe in a certain interpretation of the meaning of Jesus’ death. As rediscovered “Lost Christianities” and banned books have shown, in the beginning was diversity, experimentation, and conflict - that has continued to this day - over the meaning of Jesus’ life and teachings.
So if you have ever found yourself questioning the “party line” of a particular church or denomination’s beliefs about Jesus, you likely have historical heirs who have asked similar questions.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/carlgregg/2013/11/lost-christianities-and-banned-books-of-the-bible/
Divine right of kings, political doctrine in defense of monarchical absolutism, which asserted that kings derived their authority from God and could not therefore be held accountable for their actions by any earthly authority such as a parliament. Originating in Europe, the divine-right theory can be traced to the medieval conception of God’s award of temporal power to the political ruler, paralleling the award of spiritual power to the church. By the 16th and 17th centuries, however, the new national monarchs were asserting their authority in matters of both church and state.
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The doctrine of divine right can be dangerous for both church and state. For the state it suggests that secular authority is conferred, and can therefore be removed, by the church, and for the church it implies that kings have a direct relationship to God and may therefore dictate to ecclesiastical rulers.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/divine-right-of-kings
Thomas Aquinas allowed for the overthrow of a king (and even regicide) when the king was a usurper and thus no true king; but he forbade, as did the Church, the overthrow by his subjects of any legitimate king. The only human power capable of deposing the king was the pope. Toward the end of the Middle Ages philosophers such as Nicholas of Cusa and Francisco Suarez propounded similar theories. The Church was the final guarantor that Christian kings would follow the laws and constitutional traditions of their ancestors and the laws of God and of justice.
During the Renaissance, national powers asserted increasing independence from the papacy, and the Protestant Reformation further exacerbated the need of kings to justify their authority apart from the pope’s blessing, as well as to assert their right to rule the churches in their own realms. The advent of Protestantism also removed the counterbalancing power of the Roman church and returned the royal power to a potential position of absolute power.
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Divine_Right_of_Kings
The king is thus not subject to the will of his people, the aristocracy, or any other estate of the realm, including (in the view of some, especially in Protestant countries) the church. A weaker or more moderate form of this political theory does hold, however, that the king is subject to the church and the pope, although completely irreproachable in other ways; but according to this doctrine in its strong form, only God can judge an unjust king. The doctrine implies that any attempt to depose the king or to restrict his powers runs contrary to the will of God and may constitute a sacrilegious act. … The concept of divine right incorporates, but exaggerates, the ancient Christian concept of “royal God-given rights”, which teach that “the right to rule is anointed by God”, although this idea is found in many other cultures, including Aryan and Egyptian traditions. In pagan religions, the king was often seen as a kind of god and so was an unchallengeable despot. The ancient Roman Catholic tradition overcame this idea with the doctrine of the “Two Swords” and so achieved, for the very first time, a balanced constitution for states. The advent of Protestantism saw something of a return to the idea of a mere unchallengeable despot. … In due course, opposition to the divine right of kings came from a number of sources, including poet John Milton in his pamphlet The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, and Thomas Paine in his pamphlet Common Sense. Probably the two most famous declarations of a right to revolution against tyranny in the English language are John Locke’s Essay concerning The True Original, Extent, and End of Civil-Government and Thomas Jefferson’s formulation in the United States Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_right_of_kings
King Louis XIV He believed that unity was hard for a nation that allowed two or more churches. Louis thought that he wouldn’t have complete control if he gave the people religious freedom. He prosecuted Protestants and took Protestant children away from their parents to raise them as Catholic. King Louis XIV, being a devout catholic, Controlled the Catholic Church. Louis XIV used a similar policy in the church as he did in politics. In 1685 Louis XIV demolished the Edict of Nantes which took away the religious freedom of the French Protestants, also known as Huguenots. As a result 200,000 Huguenots left France which created economic issues. The country of France had lost a big labor force with Louis XIV’s religious choices. Louis also attacked the Jansenists. He thought that these Catholics position threatened the uniformity of France.
https://french-king-louis-xiv.weebly.com/controlled-religion.html
Henry VIII is often remembered as the English monarch who broke with the Roman Church. However, Henry was only attracted to Protestant doctrine in a limited way, as the years 1530-1547 demonstrate.
Between the years 1530-1534, Henry tried to secure the Pope’s permission to divorce Catherine of Aragon, by threatening first the English clergy and then the Pope’s powers in England. When the Pope still did not grant the divorce, Henry undertook the most extreme of measures, claiming jurisdiction over the English Church for himself. The Act of Royal Supremacy of 1534 stated that the Crown was reclaiming powers that it had always possessed; powers that Rome had usurped during the previous four hundred years - a fact which Henry and his advisors firmly believed.
Yet, by the end of 1534, the English Church was still a Catholic one. Although it was now free of Rome, its religious doctrine hadn’t changed at all. There was plenty of debate over the form of doctrine the Church should take, and Henry incorporated some evangelical ideas into his Church. The Dissolution of the Monasteries, for instance, may have been primarily concerned with matters of money and land, but it also swept away a huge and privileged clerical society. This was a very visible attack on the pre-Reformation Church, and the whole task was completed within the four years between 1536-40.
In 1536, the Ten Articles were produced as a formulary of the new Church’s faith. These articles referred to just three sacraments - baptism, penance and the Eucharist - rather than the usual seven. This was radical at the time, but also confusing, and there was much debate over the ‘missing’ four sacraments of confirmation, ordination, marriage and last rites. A month later, Thomas Cromwell’s Injunctions took a moderate stand against images in churches and against pilgrimages, and it also banned some holy days and saints’ days. The issue of transubstantiation was not specifically mentioned, and the Lutheran concept of justification by faith alone was watered down. Therefore, the official religion of England did not condemn the Mass and it did not condemn the Catholic call for good works; but emphasis was laid upon the words of the Scriptures and upon the merits of the simple Christian life. It was a tentative move in an evangelical direction.
These three years 1536-38 marked the high watermark of officially sanctioned evangelical doctrine under Henry VIII. The King was a keen theologian, and was prepared to incorporate evangelical ideas into his new Church where he saw fit. But he wasn’t comfortable with the alterations, and from 1539 onwards he reversed most of his previous policies. In 1539 the Act of Six Articles returned the Church to unambiguous Catholic orthodoxy apart from papal supremacy. Amongst other things, transubstantiation and auricular confession were reaffirmed. Clerical marriage, which had crept in, was condemned, and vows of chastity were now held to be unbreakable. This was an embarrassment to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, whose marriage was an open secret at the time.
More significantly, under this act heresy again became a felony. This was a clear signal that Henry VIII wouldn’t tolerate those with radical religious views. Henry tried to establish a concensus between Protestants and conservatives. Protestants were punished for violating the Six Articles, while papists were punished for denying the royal supremacy.
Until Henry’s death in 1547, the Act of Six Articles remained the basis of the Church’s faith. In 1543, ‘A Necessary Doctrine & Erudition for any Christian Man’ came down entirely on the side of traditional orthodoxy, and merely replaced the papal supremacy with the king’s authority. Any traces of Lutheranism that were present in the Book of 1537 ‘Institution of a Christian Man’ had now disappeared. Although the English Bible was retained, access to it was severely restricted by the Act for the Advancement of True Religion in 1543. This allowed only upper class men & women to read the Bible, with such women only allowed to read it in private.
http://www.britannia.com/history/articles/relpolh8.html
Seven Thigns You May Not Know About The King James Bible
King James believed that a single ‘authorized version’ was a political and social necessity. He hoped this book would hold together the warring factions of the Church of England and the Puritans which threatened to tear apart both church and country. Most of the translators, however, were clergymen belonging to the Church of England, but at least some had Puritan sympathies.[3]
King James issued over a dozen rules that the translators had to follow. He disliked the Geneva Bible, the Bible used by the Puritans, because he believed that some of the commentary in the margin notes did not show enough respect for kings.[4] James’ new translation was to have no commentary in the margins.
King James favoured the hierarchical structure of the Church of England and wanted the new translation to keep words that supported a bishop-led hierarchy. In keeping with James’ preferred views on church government, he specified, “The old ecclesiastical words [are] to be kept; as the word church [is] not to be translated congregation.” (I personally believe that congregation is a better translation in some instances.) King James also ruled that only his new Bible could be read in England’s churches. The translation rules of King James can be found here. The political motives of King James had a direct influence on the translation of the KJV.
http://margmowczko.com/7-things-about-the-king-james-bible/
The Conspiracy Behind the New Bible Translations
Daniel B. Wallace has taught Greek and New Testament courses on a graduate school level since 1979. He has a Ph.D. from Dallas Theological Seminary, and is currently professor of New Testament Studies at his alma mater.
His Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament (Zondervan, 1996) has become a standard textbook in colleges and seminaries. He is the senior New Testament editor of the NET Bible. Dr. Wallace is also the Executive Director for the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts.
… As for the vilification of the early MSS, John W. Burgon, then Dean of Chichester (southern England), argued that early scribes conspired against the faith. If they did so, they were singularly incompetent in their task, for they left too many things unchanged. (F. H. Scrivener, considered by many KJV fans to be the greatest textual critic of the nineteenth century [partially because he was sympathetic to much of what Burgon was saying] argued against this conspiracy theory.) In fact, they even changed some texts in a misguided attempt at making them more orthodox! Actually, all scribes did this. As is well known, the Synoptic Gospels have many parallels between them. Sometimes the wording is exactly the same between two or more; sometimes there are interesting differences. But all scribes at times changed the text of one gospel to conform it to another. If the great uncials conspired against the faith, as Burgon supposed, then why would the scribes of each of these, independently of one another, try to harmonize the gospels?
Take John 4:17 as an example. In this passage Jesus is speaking to the woman at the well. At one point he says to her, “Go, call your husband and come here.” To this she responds, “I don’t have a husband.” Jesus responds, “Correctly you have said, ‘A husband I don’t have.’” In virtually all Greek MSS, Jesus changed the word order of the woman’s statement (putting “husband” first in the sentence, making it emphatic). This was intentional. It is as if he were saying, “Lady, you’ve got someone at home–but he’s not your husband!” But significantly, two early MSS change the wording. The scribes were apparently troubled by the fact that Jesus, though purportedly quoting the woman, did not quote her exactly. It seemed to be an affront to their view of either the Lord’s character or the accuracy of the Bible. One of them changed Jesus’ words to an indirect quote: “Correctly you have said THAT a husband you do not have.” Another changed the woman’s words to conform to the word order of Jesus’ words! Apparently he couldn’t imagine the Lord quoting her other than exactly. Hence, the Lord quoted her OK, but she said it wrong in the first place! So her words were changed. These two MSS, Aleph and D, illustrate the piety of the scribes. Their corrections were misguided, to be sure. But they could hardly be charged with conspiratorial motives.
https://bible.org/article/conspiracy-behind-new-bible-translations
Fraudulent forgeries of Ignatius:
The real Ignatius, lived about 110 AD. A total of 15 letters were allegedly written by Ignatius. We take the view that all 15 of Ignatius’s letters are forgeries. The fact that neither Eusebius (300 AD) nor Jerome (495 AD) make reference to the first 8 Ignatian letters (Tarsians, Antiochians, Hero, Philippians, Maria to Ignatius, Mary, 1st. St. John, 2nd St. John, Virgin Mary) makes it likely that they were composed as late as 300-500 AD. It is this reason that all scholars reject these first 8 letters as forgeries. Some scholars, however accept that the “7 Ignatian letters” are genuine. These 7 Ignatian letters are: Polycarp, Ephesians, Magnesians, Philadelphians, Romans, Smyrnaeans, Trallians. We feel these scholars are in error and that even the 7 Ignatian letters are forgeries. (We have colour coded the quotes below.) We take the view that all of Ignatius’ writings are forgeries and unreliable. There are fifteen books attributed to Ignatius. Eight are surely forgeries and spurious. Seven are considered by some as genuine, although many scholars also believe they are all forgeries. Again, we view all Ignatius’ writings as forgeries. They purport to be written by Ignatius, who lived about 110 AD. We believe it is clear, however, that they are all no earlier than 220 AD, more likely 250 AD. Although they are forgeries, they do represent the views of the author in time of 250 AD. We see a clear change from the Bible pattern, from a plurality of Elders (also called bishops) , deacons and saints, to a single Bishop who ruled the congregations and under him were a plurality of elders, then deacons and saints. At this point in history, congregations were still autonomous and independent, but we also see the seeds of development for the Papal system, where one man rules over all churches world wide which first occurred in 606 AD. Within one of the “7 genuine Ignatius letters”, is a powerful clue it is clearly a forgery from a later time. The very first historical reference to the “Catholic Church” is nestled warmly between very strong commands to obey the bishop as you would Jesus Christ and the only valid baptism or communion service is one by the bishop’s authority. We feel that is it no co-incidence that the first historical reference to the church as the “Catholic Church” is contained within one of the “7 genuine Ignatius letters”. Schaff comments: “been found in this letter to the Romans, especially as in this letter we first find the use of the phrase”Catholic Church" in patristic writings." (Philip Schaff: Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. I, Introductory Note To The Epistle Of Ignatius To The Ephesians.) We feel it is proof enough to reject all as forgeries. “See that ye all follow the bishop, even as Jesus Christ does the Father … Let no man do anything connected with the Church without the bishop. Let that be deemed a proper Eucharist, which is [administered] either by the bishop, or by one to whom he has entrusted it. Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude [of the people] also be; even as, wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church. It is not lawful without the bishop either to baptize or to celebrate a love-feast; but whatsoever he shall approve of, that is also pleasing to God, so that everything that is done may be secure and valid. (The Epistle of Ignatius to the Smyrnaeans, Chapter VIII.-Let Nothing Be Done Without the Bishop.) Having said this, the Ignatian letters do represent real history for the dates they were actually written. Forgeries yes, but even the forgeries prove that there was no one bishop over the church universal. The first 8 letters of Ignatius do provide insights into what a the 4th-5th century author wished Ignatius had said in support of the authors current setting. The 7 letters of Ignatius being written probably around 250 AD, likewise give an insight into what was going on in 250 AD. We therefore date the 8 letters of Ignatius at 300-500 AD and the 7 letters of Ignatius at about 250 AD.”It is now the universal opinion of critics, that the first eight of these professedly Ignatian letters are spurious. They bear in themselves indubitable proofs of being the production of a later age than that in which Ignatius lived. Neither Eusebius nor Jerome makes the least reference to them; and they are now by common consent set aside as forgeries, which were at various dates, and to serve special purposes, put forth under the name of the celebrated Bishop of Antioch." (Philip Schaff, Ante-Nicene Fathers, Introductory Note To The Epistle Of Ignatius To The Ephesians) “The whole story of Ignatius is more legendary than real, and his writings are subject to grave suspicion of fraudulent interpolation. We have three different versions of the Ignatian Epistles, but only one of them can be genuine; either the smaller Greek version, or the lately discovered Syriac. In the latter, which contains only three epistles, most of the passages on the episcopate are wanting, indeed; yet the leading features of the institution appear even here” (History of the Christian Church, Philip Shaff, Vol 2, ch 4) “Already, in the infancy of the episcopate, began the second stage of development, that of express emphasis upon its importance. Ignatius of Antioch was the first to represent this stage. Again and again, in his epistles, he urges obedience to the bishop, warns against doing any thing without the bishop, represents the bishop as standing to the congregation as the vicegerent of Christ. At the same time, he regarded each bishop as limited to his own congregation, and recognized no essential distinctions within the episcopal body. Ignatius, however, appears to have been an exception to his age, in the degree of emphasis which he put upon the episcopal dignity. He stands so nearly alone in this respect, that some have been disposed to question the genuineness of the epistles attributed to him. Baur declares it impossible that any writer of so early an age could have uttered such high episcopal notions as appear in the so-called Ignatian Epistles.” (Henry C. Sheldon, History of the Christian Church, Vol 1, p 147)
The value of the 15 forged Ignatius letters: The Ignatius forgeries clearly mark that period of history, when a single bishop ruled over a local church and was to view his authority as that of Jesus Christ. Members were to told to be “subject to the bishop as to Jesus Christ … also be subject to the presbytery, as to the apostle of Jesus Christ”. And “bishop presides in the place of God, and your presbyters in the place of the assembly of the apostles”. In this way a single bishop is notably above the elders, just as Christ is above his apostles. This is actually quite blasphemous and nothing like this is found within the New Testament. Only a man of depraved mind with an evil thirst for power would ever equate the authority of a bishop with Jesus Christ. We also have bishops who were very young: “not to treat your bishop too familiarly on account of his youth”. This clearly violates the qualifications set forth in 1 Tim 3 and Tit 1, where bishops are called Elders, meaning an elder man. The power of the bishop is also absolute. These kind of statements actually paved the way for papal infallibility. It also took the commands to baptize and server the communion out of the hands of the common Christian and gave it as the sole authority to the bishop. This again is foreign to the New Testament where there was no “clergy/laity distinction”: “It is not lawful without the bishop either to baptize, or to offer, or to present sacrifice, or to celebrate a love-feast” and “he who does anything without the knowledge of the bishop, does [in reality] serve the devil” It is clear from the forged Ignatius writings, however, that Patriarchs or even diocese (a mother church ruling over a number of other local churches in a geographic area), did not exist at that time. At this point of history, Ignatius provides valuable insight to the stage between local bishops ruling over a single congregation and the age of the Patriarchs that existed in 325 AD.
http://www.bible.ca/history-ignatius-forgeries-250AD.htm
Biblical Terror - Why Law and Restroation in the Bible Depend Upon Fear Jeremiah W. Cataldo
Jeremiah W. Cataldo is Associate Professor of History in the Frederik Meijer Honors College at Grand Valley State University, USA.
For biblical authors and readers, law and restoration are central concepts in the Bible, but they were not always so. To trace out the formation of those biblical concepts as elements in defensive strategies, Cataldo uses as conversational starting points theories from Zizek, Foucault and Deleuze, all of whom emphasize relation and difference. This work argues that the more modern assumption that biblical authors wrote their texts presupposing a central importance for those concepts is backwards. On the contrary, law and restoration were made central only through and after the writing of the biblical texts - in particular, those that were concerned with protecting the community from threats to its identity as the “remnant”. Modern Bible readers, Cataldo argues, must renegotiate how they understand law and restoration and come to terms with them as concepts that emerged out of more selfish concerns of a community on the margins of imperial political power.
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How are the biblical concepts of law and restoration dependent upon anxiety? Our hypothesis is that anxiety over lawlessness and disorder - over “death” in a general sense -created teh foundation for the monotheistic concepts law and the restroation. The sense of this can be seen in Jeremiah, for example, “The LORD could no longer bear the signt of your evil doings, the abdominations you committed; therefore your land became a desolation and a waste and a d curse, without inhabitant, as it is to this day” (Jer 44:22). So we must bear in mind that we moderns are the beneficiaries of a monotheistic, biblical law and concept of restration not because of any positivistic or altruistic desires of the biblical authors. Theirs was a focuus more selfish: I want land. I want authority over it. Such desires were strategies of self-preservation, as we will argue. …
If the biblical concepts of law and restroation are responses to anxieties, we must take then as a given that no behaviour is preformed without political, historically contingent, motivation and rationale. Anxieities stem from the places we live. In that regard, religious behaviour is not wholly distinct from political behaviour. All social behaviour that impacts to varying degrees the distribution of power is political behaviour. Can we not say then that political behaviour is motivated behaviour, the desired or pursued object of which is the preservation of a normative order, including its hierarchies of power and the general stability of the cultural world? If we can accept that as a starting premise, then we may hypothesize, and let the selfless heavenly choire be silent now, that the biblical texsts are not the result of any divine-human relationship. They are their collective entirety products of political behaviour - human responses to anxieities generated in relationship with the surrounding world.
I explain how I learned from A History of God that the evidence indicates that the Jewish concept of monotheism evolved from the syncretism of various polytheistic sources like Canaanite and Babylonian polytheism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlnnWbkMlbg
Richard Elliott Friedman is a leading proponent of the Documentary Hypothesis, which maintains that the the biblical texts traditionally known as the Five Books of Moses are actually the synthesis of many different sources from different time periods. The conclusions drawn in his earlier bestseller “Who Wrote the Bible?” are the basis for his new work, a translation of the Bible’s first five books which uses color coding to separate different sources.
The Editorial Team Behind the Bible Who wrote the first five books of the Bible–and spliced older texts with newer ones?
In your introduction, you say your work–identifying and separating the different authors of the first five books of the Bible–is not meant to produce faith crises. Obviously, there are people out there with a strong belief about the author of the Bible. What’s the role of divine inspiration here?
Some of the earliest Bible scholars who questioned who the authors were said, “Well, it wasn’t all one person, it wasn’t Moses who wrote the first five books”-even they were pious rabbis, priests, or ministers. Their answer was, “OK, it wasn’t Moses who wrote it down, it was other people, but it still came from God.” Today, there are religious Jews and Christians who take that same view: it could still be of a divine origin. But for others, this is a troubling and unacceptable point of view. They stand by the tradition that it was dictated to Moses by God at Sinai. So, yes, for them this is difficult.My purpose is to put the evidence in front of everyone so they can argue for it or against it. The purpose is not to hurt. People imagine I’m attacked all the time by fundamentalist Christians and orthodox Jews, but in fact I’m not. We disagree respectfully. Your new book, The Bible with Sources Revealed, talks about the different authors of the first five books of the Bible. Who are these authors?
The largest main sources are the J and E texts, called that because among the many differences between them, each one has a different idea about when the name of God, Yahweh, became known to humankind. One of them has the idea that the name “Yahweh” was known from earliest times, and is called J because of the German spelling Jahwe (German scholars played a prominent role in working J out).The other source understands that the name of God was not revealed until very late, at the time of Moses, so God until that time is referred to as God, which in Hebrew is Elohim. That’s why it’s called E.Those two sources come from a very early period of Israelite history. We know this for a variety of reasons, especially since they use a very early level of Hebrew than the other parts of the five books.
Like American English today vs. Shakespearian or Chaucerian English?
Exactly. They are that far apart from some of the later parts of the Torah. Every now and then we hear some biblical scholar suggest that those texts are late, but that’s like if you and I were talking now and I started saying “forsooth!” and “whither?” and pulled out a bodkin. In the book, we used different colors and fonts, italics, bold [read an excerpt]–whatever would make it easier for people to read any given sentence of the first five books of the Bible and know which source they’re reading.
J and E contain most of the Genesis stories we’re familiar with-the Creation, the Flood, and so on, right? Yes, a lot of the most famous stories first appear in J and E. J has the flood story, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babel. E has the sacrifice of Isaac. So the two of them together form a great collection of stories. The hypothesis is that the Holy Land was split in half from 922 to 722 BCE, with Israel in north and Judah in south. The E version of the stories came from the northern kingdom, and the J version from the southern kingdom.
Would writers from those kingdoms have different agendas? Oh yes. The author of J was a layperson. The author of E was a priest, but from a priesthood group of Levites who traced their descent from Moses. In the E source, the Golden Calf is made by Aaron. Aaron is the ancestor of the other prominent priesthood in Judah, which had excluded the other Levites from the priesthood.Whereas the J source does not tell the story of the Golden Calf.With destruction of northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE, there were no longer two countries, there was one. Soon after those events, the two texts, J and E, came to be merged by a redactor who we call RJE.If you read J and E together as put together by RJE, and take out everything else from the Bible, they read almost as a continuous source.There’s not too much overlap or contradiction?
There are some really interesting doublets between the two-for example, in both, Abraham tells a foreign king his wife Sarah is his sister. Then the deception comes out, and the king sends Abraham away with compensation for the insult done to him. Sometimes they duplicate, but with differences. Sometimes they’re completely different. E has the sacrifice of Isaac and the Golden Calf, but J doesn’t. But J has the story of the three visitors to Abraham, which E doesn’t.When they’re all put together, they read as a continuous story, which means this editor cut parts of J and parts of E but created something that would work as a continuous story for everyone. It was the second most brilliant editing job in the Torah.But imagine now you’re a priest in Jerusalem, and you trace your ancestry to Aaron, the first high priest. And here’s this proto-Bible going around saying your ancestor made the Golden Calf, and the main man was Moses.So a third source, a third version of the stories, was composed at this point by a priest to…
Support that priesthood?Right. It duplicates a lot of the stories, but tells them from a different point of view. And it most certainly does not duplicate the Golden Calf story. Because it has this priestly perspective, this source is called P. It’s written intentionally as an alternative to the JE version. On the JE side, it often says “And the Lord spoke unto Moses.” On the P side, it says “And the Lord spoke unto Moses and unto Aaron.” Sometimes it’s called pious fraud, but I don’t think this person was a fraud at all. He was trying to tell history as he understood it, in a way that wouldn’t be hurtful to his group.
How are these sources related to the different creation stories in Genesis?J’s creation story is focused very much in the earth and begins in Gen 2:4 with “the day that Yahweh made earth and skies.” But P’s version, which now is Gen 1, is “in the beginning God created the skies and earth.” It’s more like from the sky looking down. The older creation story is from the earth looking up. In the J creation story, there’s no mention of the sun, the moon, the stars being created. Whereas the priestly P version begins with the creation of light, the firmament, setting the sun and moon in the sky, the seas-it’s more of a universal picture.
What are other differences between the older and newer sources?
Exodus 17, Moses hitting rock at Meribah. In E’s version of that story, the people are thirsty, so God tells Moses to stand on a crag at Horeb, the foot of Mt. Sinai, and strike it and water will come out. He does, and it says God is standing on the crag at the time. The water flows out, and Moses has done a good thing. In the priestly (P) version of it, which is more favorable to Aaron and less favorable to Moses, it’s in Numbers 20. There, God tells Moses ‘speak to the rock.’ Moses strikes the rock instead. Moses says to the people “shall we bring you water out of the rock,” where presumably he should have said “should God bring you water,” and it’s considered the great sin of Moses’ life.
The sin that keeps Moses out of the Promised Land.
Yes. And Aaron, who suffers for the sin of Moses in the priestly version. It’s telling the stories but from a different perspective.
You mentioned God standing on crag. Your book says that anthropomorphisms are one way to differentiate between the sources-some sources don’t use them.
J and E have much more of that sort of thing-God is standing on the rock, God walks in the garden of Eden and makes Adam and Eve’s clothes in J, God personally closes the ark in J. There are angels in J and E, but no angels in P.
Why no angels? For P, there mustn’t be any intermediaries between God and humans except priests. The word prophet never appears in P, except once where it refers figuratively to Aaron himself. No prophets, judges, no angels, talking animals, or dreams. Whereas in J and E there’s the famous story of Jacob dreaming of the ladder, and Joseph interpreting the dreams of the Pharaoh and his own dreams. So there’s a different feel to the priestly source. In the priestly source, the path to God is, bring a sacrifice to the priest.
You translated the sources in the order they were written. What was that like?I get a sense of these authors as persons, the way you do when you have a favorite author.When you read each one in order, you get a feel for the beauty of each one. It’s like watching one of those slow films of a flower opening up. You see the Bible becoming the Bible.
What’s the strongest evidence for your multiple-source hypothesis?
For me, it’s a tie between two things: the linguistic evidence–Hebrew of different periods differentiates the sources. It fits with the idea we have about when the different sources were written. It’s almost like math: the personal prejudices of the Bible scholar can’t enter in as much. It’s cleaner evidence than most.
The other big thing is the convergence of so many different lines of evidence. It’s not that there are double stories, because we could explain that as the author’s intention. And it’s not that God is referred to as “God” in some chapters or “Yahweh” in others, because obviously we could refer to people sometimes by their name and sometimes by their profession, for example.It’s that when you separate the different sources, the other [word for] God always comes out in the right place. The different words for God occur in the five books of Moses about 2000 times, and the number of exceptions where you get “Yahweh” where you should have gotten “God” are 3.
You said earlier that the editor of J and E did the “second greatest editing job” in the history of the Torah. What’s the greatest?You have J and E, and P written as an alternative, and another source, D (virtually the whole book of Deuteronomy)-that’s by someone else.But then someone came along around 450 BCE, the redactor of the whole thing, who’s probably Ezra, as I’ve argued in the past. He-“R”–comes along and puts it all together. When you read J or E individually, they read as a continuous story. If you read P all by itself, it also reads almost as a continuous story, with hardly a gap. Which means this last person, this redactor we call R……Had to splice together three things that already worked well on their own?Right. He put it together with hardly cutting a word. It’s one of the great achievements of editing of any literature in history, by anyone, ever. He put it together so well that it’s been not only satisfactory, but beloved: The most successful, powerful book in the world fro 2500 years since he did it. The irony is that he took the combined JE, and then P, which was written deliberately as an alternative to JE, and puts them together and makes them work so well together. Outside of its being the Bible, it’s a great human achievement by any standard.
You say the Bible is more than the sum of its parts.When you see it come together like this, it adds a layer of depth to your appreciation of the book. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. Let’s take an example: In Genesis 1, God creates humans in the divine image. At minimum, that means humans participate in the divine in a way that a cat does not. Then in Genesis 3, when the snake is trying to get the humans to eat from the tree, [the snake] uses that. His line is “if you eat from the tree, you will be like God,” which presumably is a line that wouldn’t work on a cat, because a cat doesn’t aspire to be like God. Then you say, “wait, Genesis chapter 1–the creation in the divine image–is P, and the snake talking to Adam and Eve is J.” So neither author meant this to happen, and you can’t say the redactor even meant this to happen, because he’s including both J and P complete, putting it together as best he can. So in a very real sense, the Bible becomes greater not only than each of its authors, but than all of them put together.
That’s kind of divine inspiration right there, in a way. A fundamentalist might look at that and say, yeah, there, you see. And some of my more religious students have said that. When you read the Bible this way, you see it not just as the genius of any one person at one time, but the genius of a whole community over almost 1000 years.
http://www.beliefnet.com/faiths/2004/02/the-editorial-team-behind-the-bible.aspx#jUks3PrIG8PkFxyu.99
John Dominic Crossan’s ‘blasphemous’ portrait of Jesus
In another time, Crossan’s views would have been confined to scholarly journals. But he and his best-selling books, including the recent “Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography,” have changed how biblical scholars operate.
Crossan believes the public should be exposed to even the most divisive debates that scholars have had about Jesus and the Bible. He co-founded the Jesus Seminar, a controversial group of scholars who hold public forums that cast doubt on the authenticity of many sayings and deeds attributed to Jesus.
John Dominic Crossan says even the writers of the Bible disagreed about Jesus’ message. The 77-year-old Crossan has built on the seminar’s mission by writing a series of best-selling books on Jesus and the Apostle Paul. With his silver Prince Valiant haircut and his pronounced Irish accent, he’s also appeared on documentaries such as PBS’s “From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians” and A&E’s “Mysteries of the Bible.”
Crossan’s overarching message is that you don’t have to accept the Jesus of dogma. There’s another Jesus hidden in Scripture and history who has been ignored.
“He’s changed the way we look and think about Jesus,” says Byron McCane, an archaeologist and professor of religion at Wofford College in South Carolina. “He’s important in a way that few scholars are.”
Crossan immersed himself in the world of the Bible for the rest of his adult life. When he entered a monastery at 16, church leaders told him they wanted him to be a scholar because he had already taken five years of Latin and Greek.
He became a priestly prodigy: ordained by 23; a doctorate at 25. He studied in Rome and Jerusalem, and eventually became a New Testament scholar who became known as an authority on the parables of Jesus. (Crossan saw them as subversive literary gems.)
His days as a priest would end, though, because of the same forces that shaped the rest of his career: the clash between church dogma and scholarly truth.
Crossan says it was “bliss” being a priest and scholar in the mid-1960s because the Roman Catholic Church had instituted a series of modernizing reforms.
But conservative church leaders fought those reforms, and Crossan says they pressured him to steer his research toward conclusions that reinforced church doctrine.
“It’s like you’re a scientist in research and development, and you say that this drug is lethal, and they say, ‘Find something good in it,’ ’’ Crossan says.
His findings often end up challenging some of Christianity’s most cherished beliefs.
Consider his understanding of the resurrection. Jesus didn’t bodily rise from the dead, he says. The first Christians told Jesus’ resurrection story as a parable, not as a fact.
“Crucifixion meant that imperial power had won,” Crossan says. “Resurrection meant that divine justice had won. God is on the side of the crucified one. Rome’s’ values are a dead issue to me.”
How about the stories of Jesus’ miracles, like raising the dead or stilling the storm?
Most were parables, too, Crossan says.
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/LIVING/02/27/Jesus.scholar/index.html
Who Was Mary Magdalene? From the writing of the New Testament to the filming of The Da Vinci Code, her image has been repeatedly conscripted, contorted and contradicted By James Carroll (American author, historian, and journalist)
The whole history of western civilization is epitomized in the cult of Mary Magdalene. For many centuries the most obsessively revered of saints, this woman became the embodiment of Christian devotion, which was defined as repentance. Yet she was only elusively identified in Scripture, and has thus served as a scrim onto which a succession of fantasies has been projected. In one age after another her image was reinvented, from prostitute to sibyl to mystic to celibate nun to passive helpmeet to feminist icon to the matriarch of divinity’s secret dynasty. How the past is remembered, how sexual desire is domesticated, how men and women negotiate their separate impulses; how power inevitably seeks sanctification, how tradition becomes authoritative, how revolutions are co-opted; how fallibility is reckoned with, and how sweet devotion can be made to serve violent domination-all these cultural questions helped shape the story of the woman who befriended Jesus of Nazareth.
Who was she? From the New Testament, one can conclude that Mary of Magdala (her hometown, a village on the shore of the Sea of Galilee) was a leading figure among those attracted to Jesus. When the men in that company abandoned him at the hour of mortal danger, Mary of Magdala was one of the women who stayed with him, even to the Crucifixion. She was present at the tomb, the first person to whom Jesus appeared after his resurrection and the first to preach the “Good News” of that miracle. These are among the few specific assertions made about Mary Magdalene in the Gospels. From other texts of the early Christian era, it seems that her status as an “apostle,” in the years after Jesus’ death, rivaled even that of Peter. This prominence derived from the intimacy of her relationship with Jesus, which, according to some accounts, had a physical aspect that included kissing. Beginning with the threads of these few statements in the earliest Christian records, dating to the first through third centuries, an elaborate tapestry was woven, leading to a portrait of St. Mary Magdalene in which the most consequential note-that she was a repentant prostitute-is almost certainly untrue. On that false note hangs the dual use to which her legend has been put ever since: discrediting sexuality in general and disempowering women in particular.
Confusions attached to Mary Magdalene’s character were compounded across time as her image was conscripted into one power struggle after another, and twisted accordingly. In conflicts that defined the Christian Church-over attitudes toward the material world, focused on sexuality; the authority of an all-male clergy; the coming of celibacy; the branding of theological diversity as heresy; the sublimations of courtly love; the unleashing of “chivalrous” violence; the marketing of sainthood, whether in the time of Constantine, the Counter-Reformation, the Romantic era, or the Industrial Age-through all of these, reinventions of Mary Magdalene played their role. Her recent reemergence in a novel and film as the secret wife of Jesus and the mother of his fate-burdened daughter shows that the conscripting and twisting are still going on.
But, in truth, the confusion starts with the Gospels themselves.
In the gospels several women come into the story of Jesus with great energy, including erotic energy. There are several Marys-not least, of course, Mary the mother of Jesus. But there is Mary of Bethany, sister of Martha and Lazarus. There is Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and Mary the wife of Clopas. Equally important, there are three unnamed women who are expressly identified as sexual sinners-the woman with a “bad name” who wipes Jesus’ feet with ointment as a signal of repentance, a Samaritan woman whom Jesus meets at a well and an adulteress whom Pharisees haul before Jesus to see if he will condemn her. The first thing to do in unraveling the tapestry of Mary Magdalene is to tease out the threads that properly belong to these other women. Some of these threads are themselves quite knotted.
It will help to remember how the story that includes them all came to be written. The four Gospels are not eyewitness accounts. They were written 35 to 65 years after Jesus’ death, a jelling of separate oral traditions that had taken form in dispersed Christian communities. Jesus died in about the year a.d. 30. The Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke date to about 65 to 85, and have sources and themes in common. The Gospel of John was composed around 90 to 95 and is distinct. So when we read about Mary Magdalene in each of the Gospels, as when we read about Jesus, what we are getting is not history but memory-memory shaped by time, by shades of emphasis and by efforts to make distinctive theological points. And already, even in that early period-as is evident when the varied accounts are measured against each other-the memory is blurred.
As the story of Jesus was told and told again in those first decades, narrative adjustments in event and character were inevitable, and confusion of one with the other was a mark of the way the Gospels were handed on. Most Christians were illiterate; they received their traditions through a complex work of memory and interpretation, not history, that led only eventually to texts. Once the sacred texts were authoritatively set, the exegetes who interpreted them could make careful distinctions, keeping the roster of women separate, but common preachers were less careful. The telling of anecdotes was essential to them, and so alterations were certain to occur.
The multiplicity of the Marys by itself was enough to mix things up-as were the various accounts of anointing, which in one place is the act of a loose-haired prostitute, in another of a modest stranger preparing Jesus for the tomb, and in yet another of a beloved friend named Mary. Women who weep, albeit in a range of circumstances, emerged as a motif. As with every narrative, erotic details loomed large, especially because Jesus’ attitude toward women with sexual histories was one of the things that set him apart from other teachers of the time. Not only was Jesus remembered as treating women with respect, as equals in his circle; not only did he refuse to reduce them to their sexuality; Jesus was expressly portrayed as a man who loved women, and whom women loved.
The climax of that theme takes place in the garden of the tomb, with that one word of address, “Mary!” It was enough to make her recognize him, and her response is clear from what he says then: “Do not cling to me.” Whatever it was before, bodily expression between Jesus and Mary of Magdala must be different now.
Out of these disparate threads-the various female figures, the ointment, the hair, the weeping, the unparalleled intimacy at the tomb-a new character was created for Mary Magdalene. Out of the threads, that is, a tapestry was woven-a single narrative line. Across time, this Mary went from being an important disciple whose superior status depended on the confidence Jesus himself had invested in her, to a repentant whore whose status depended on the erotic charge of her history and the misery of her stricken conscience. In part, this development arose out of a natural impulse to see the fragments of Scripture whole, to make a disjointed narrative adhere, with separate choices and consequences being tied to each other in one drama. It is as if Aristotle’s principle of unity, given in Poetics, was imposed after the fact on the foundational texts of Christianity.
Thus, for example, out of discrete episodes in the Gospel narratives, some readers would even create a far more unified-more satisfying-legend according to which Mary of Magdala was the unnamed woman being married at the wedding feast of Cana, where Jesus famously turned water into wine. Her spouse, in this telling, was John, whom Jesus immediately recruited to be one of the Twelve. When John went off from Cana with the Lord, leaving his new wife behind, she collapsed in a fit of loneliness and jealousy and began to sell herself to other men. She next appeared in the narrative as the by then notorious adulteress whom the Pharisees thrust before Jesus. When Jesus refused to condemn her, she saw the error of her ways. Consequently, she went and got her precious ointment and spread it on his feet, weeping in sorrow. From then on she followed him, in chastity and devotion, her love forever unconsummated-“Do not cling to me!”-and more intense for being so.
Such a woman lives on as Mary Magdalene in Western Christianity and in the secular Western imagination, right down, say, to the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, in which Mary Magdalene sings, “I don’t know how to love him…He’s just a man, and I’ve had so many men before…I want him so. I love him so.” The story has timeless appeal, first, because that problem of “how”-whether love should be eros or agape; sensual or spiritual; a matter of longing or consummation-defines the human condition. What makes the conflict universal is the dual experience of sex: the necessary means of reproduction and the madness of passionate encounter. For women, the maternal can seem to be at odds with the erotic, a tension that in men can be reduced to the well-known opposite fantasies of the madonna and the whore. I write as a man, yet it seems to me in women this tension is expressed in attitudes not toward men, but toward femaleness itself. The image of Mary Magdalene gives expression to such tensions, and draws power from them, especially when it is twinned to the image of that other Mary, Jesus’ mother.
Christians may worship the Blessed Virgin, but it is Magdalene with whom they identify. What makes her compelling is that she is not merely the whore in contrast to the Madonna who is the mother of Jesus, but that she combines both figures in herself. Pure by virtue of her repentance, she nevertheless remains a woman with a past. Her conversion, instead of removing her erotic allure, heightens it. The misery of self-accusation, known in one way or another to every human being, finds release in a figure whose abject penitence is the condition of recovery. That she is sorry for having led the willful life of a sex object makes her only more compelling as what might be called a repentance object.
So the invention of the character of Mary Magdalene as repentant prostitute can be seen as having come about because of pressures inhering in the narrative form and in the primordial urge to give expression to the inevitable tensions of sexual restlessness. But neither of these was the main factor in the conversion of Mary Magdalene’s image, from one that challenged men’s misogynist assumptions to one that confirmed them. The main factor in that transformation was, in fact, the manipulation of her image by those very men. The mutation took a long time to accomplish-fully the first 600 years of the Christian era.
Again, it helps to have a chronology in mind, with a focus on the place of women in the Jesus movement. Phase one is the time of Jesus himself, and there is every reason to believe that, according to his teaching and in his circle, women were uniquely empowered as fully equal. In phase two, when the norms and assumptions of the Jesus community were being written down, the equality of women is reflected in the letters of St. Paul (c. 50-60), who names women as full partners-his partners-in the Christian movement, and in the Gospel accounts that give evidence of Jesus’ own attitudes and highlight women whose courage and fidelity stand in marked contrast to the men’s cowardice.
But by phase three-after the Gospels are written, but before the New Testament is defined as such-Jesus’ rejection of the prevailing male dominance was being eroded in the Christian community. The Gospels themselves, written in those several decades after Jesus, can be read to suggest this erosion because of their emphasis on the authority of “the Twelve,” who are all males. (The all-male composition of “the Twelve” is expressly used by the Vatican today to exclude women from ordination.) But in the books of the New Testament, the argument among Christians over the place of women in the community is implicit; it becomes quite explicit in other sacred texts of that early period. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the figure who most embodies the imaginative and theological conflict over the place of women in the “church,” as it had begun to call itself, is Mary Magdalene.
Here, it is useful to recall not only how the New Testament texts were composed, but also how they were selected as a sacred literature. The popular assumption is that the Epistles of Paul and James and the four Gospels, together with the Acts of the Apostles and the Book of Revelation, were pretty much what the early Christian community had by way of foundational writings. These texts, believed to be “inspired by the Holy Spirit,” are regarded as having somehow been conveyed by God to the church, and joined to the previously “inspired” and selected books of the Old Testament to form “the Bible.” But the holy books of Christianity (like the holy books of Judaism, for that matter) were established by a process far more complicated (and human) than that.
The explosive spread of the Good News of Jesus around the Mediterranean world meant that distinct Christian communities were springing up all over the place. There was a lively diversity of belief and practice, which was reflected in the oral traditions and, later, texts those communities drew on. In other words, there were many other texts that could have been included in the “canon” (or list), but weren’t.
It was not until the fourth century that the list of canonized books we now know as the New Testament was established. This amounted to a milestone on the road toward the church’s definition of itself precisely in opposition to Judaism. At the same time, and more subtly, the church was on the way toward understanding itself in opposition to women. Once the church began to enforce the “orthodoxy” of what it deemed Scripture and its doctrinally defined creed, rejected texts-and sometimes the people who prized them, also known as heretics-were destroyed. This was a matter partly of theological dispute-If Jesus was divine, in what way?-and partly of boundary-drawing against Judaism. But there was also an expressly philosophical inquiry at work, as Christians, like their pagan contemporaries, sought to define the relationship between spirit and matter. Among Christians, that argument would soon enough focus on sexuality-and its battleground would be the existential tension between male and female.
As the sacred books were canonized, which texts were excluded, and why? This is the long way around, but we are back to our subject, because one of the most important Christian texts to be found outside the New Testament canon is the so-called Gospel of Mary, a telling of the Jesus-movement story that features Mary Magdalene (decidedly not the woman of the “alabaster jar”) as one of its most powerful leaders. Just as the “canonical” Gospels emerged from communities that associated themselves with the “evangelists,” who may not actually have “written” the texts, this one is named for Mary not because she “wrote” it, but because it emerged from a community that recognized her authority.
Whether through suppression or neglect, the Gospel of Mary was lost in the early period-just as the real Mary Magdalene was beginning to disappear into the writhing misery of a penitent whore, and as women were disappearing from the church’s inner circle. It reappeared in 1896, when a well-preserved, if incomplete, fifth-century copy of a document dating to the second century showed up for sale in Cairo; eventually, other fragments of this text were found. Only slowly through the 20th century did scholars appreciate what the rediscovered Gospel revealed, a process that culminated with the publication in 2003 of The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle by Karen L. King.
Although Jesus rejected male dominance, as symbolized in his commissioning of Mary Magdalene to spread word of the Resurrection, male dominance gradually made a powerful comeback within the Jesus movement. But for that to happen, the commissioning of Mary Magdalene had to be reinvented.
One sees that very thing under way in the Gospel of Mary. For example, Peter’s preeminence is elsewhere taken for granted (in Matthew, Jesus says, “You are Peter and on this rock I will build my Church”). Here, he defers to her:
Peter said to Mary, “Sister, we know that the Savior loved you more than all other women. Tell us the words of the Savior that you remember, the things which you know that we don’t because we haven’t heard them.”
Mary responded, “I will teach you about what is hidden from you.” And she began to speak these words to them.
Mary recalls her vision, a kind of esoteric description of the ascent of the soul. The disciples Peter and Andrew are disturbed-not by what she says, but by how she knows it. And now a jealous Peter complains to his fellows, “Did [Jesus] choose her over us?” This draws a sharp rebuke from another apostle, Levi, who says, “If the Savior made her worthy, who are you then for your part to reject her?”
That was the question not only about Mary Magdalene, but about women generally. It should be no surprise, given how successfully the excluding dominance of males established itself in the church of the “Fathers,” that the Gospel of Mary was one of the texts shunted aside in the fourth century. As that text shows, the early image of this Mary as a trusted apostle of Jesus, reflected even in the canonical Gospel texts, proved to be a major obstacle to establishing that male dominance, which is why, whatever other “heretical” problems this gospel posed, that image had to be recast as one of subservience.
Simultaneously, the emphasis on sexuality as the root of all evil served to subordinate all women. The ancient Roman world was rife with flesh-hating spiritualities-Stoicism, Manichaeism, Neoplatonism-and they influenced Christian thinking just as it was jelling into “doctrine.” Thus the need to disempower the figure of Mary Magdalene, so that her succeeding sisters in the church would not compete with men for power, meshed with the impulse to discredit women generally. This was most efficiently done by reducing them to their sexuality, even as sexuality itself was reduced to the realm of temptation, the source of human unworthiness. All of this-from the sexualizing of Mary Magdalene, to the emphatic veneration of the virginity of Mary, the mother of Jesus, to the embrace of celibacy as a clerical ideal, to the marginalizing of female devotion, to the recasting of piety as self-denial, particularly through penitential cults-came to a kind of defining climax at the end of the sixth century. It was then that all the philosophical, theological and ecclesiastical impulses curved back to Scripture, seeking an ultimate imprimatur for what by then was a firm cultural prejudice. It was then that the rails along which the church-and the Western imagination-would run were set.
Known as Gregory the Great, he remains one of the most influential figures ever to serve as pope, and in a famous series of sermons on Mary Magdalene, given in Rome in about the year 591, he put the seal on what until then had been a common but unsanctioned reading of her story. With that, Mary’s conflicted image was, in the words of Susan Haskins, author of Mary Magdalene: Myth and Metaphor, “finally settled…for nearly fourteen hundred years.”
Gregory, standing on his own authority, offered his decoding of the relevant Gospel texts. He established the context within which their meaning was measured from then on:
“It is clear, brothers, that the woman previously used the unguent to perfume her flesh in forbidden acts. What she therefore displayed more scandalously, she was now offering to God in a more praiseworthy manner. She had coveted with earthly eyes, but now through penitence these are consumed with tears. She displayed her hair to set off her face, but now her hair dries her tears. She had spoken proud things with her mouth, but in kissing the Lord’s feet, she now planted her mouth on the Redeemer’s feet. For every delight, therefore, she had had in herself, she now immolated herself. She turned the mass of her crimes to virtues, in order to serve God entirely in penance.”
The address “brothers” is the clue. Through the Middle Ages and the Counter-Reformation, into the modern period and against the Enlightenment, monks and priests would read Gregory’s words, and through them they would read the Gospels’ texts themselves. Chivalrous knights, nuns establishing houses for unwed mothers, courtly lovers, desperate sinners, frustrated celibates and an endless succession of preachers would treat Gregory’s reading as literally the gospel truth. Holy Writ, having recast what had actually taken place in the lifetime of Jesus, was itself recast.
The men of the church who benefited from the recasting, forever spared the presence of females in their sanctuaries, would not know that this was what had happened. Having created a myth, they would not remember that it was mythical. Their Mary Magdalene-no fiction, no composite, no betrayal of a once venerated woman-became the only Mary Magdalene that had ever existed.
This obliteration of the textual distinctions served to evoke an ideal of virtue that drew its heat from being a celibate’s vision, conjured for celibates. Gregory the Great’s overly particular interest in the fallen woman’s past-what that oil had been used for, how that hair had been displayed, that mouth-brought into the center of church piety a vaguely prurient energy that would thrive under the licensing sponsorship of one of the church’s most revered reforming popes. Eventually, Magdalene, as a denuded object of Renaissance and Baroque painterly preoccupation, became a figure of nothing less than holy pornography, guaranteeing the ever-lustful harlot-if lustful now for the ecstasy of holiness-a permanent place in the Catholic imagination.
Thus Mary of Magdala, who began as a powerful woman at Jesus’ side, “became,” in Haskins’ summary, “the redeemed whore and Christianity’s model of repentance, a manageable, controllable figure, and effective weapon and instrument of propaganda against her own sex.” There were reasons of narrative form for which this happened. There was a harnessing of sexual restlessness to this image. There was the humane appeal of a story that emphasized the possibility of forgiveness and redemption. But what most drove the anti-sexual sexualizing of Mary Magdalene was the male need to dominate women. In the Catholic Church, as elsewhere, that need is still being met.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/who-was-mary-magdalene-119565482/
John Dominic Crossan On The Historical Jesus
Ep 3: How to read the Christian Bible still be a Christian: an edited version of public lectures for a national gathering by progressive Biblical Scholar John Dominic Crossan. Dr Crossan presents a series of lectures across three days in Sydney at Pitt St Uniting Church, from his one and only visit to Australia in 2012. http://www.abc.net.au/sundaynights/stories/s3683087.htm
Karen Armstrong, A former Roman Catholic religious sister, is an English author of books on religion who was widely regarded as one of the leading commentators on the subject in Great Britain. She is author of numerous other books on religious affairs - including A History of God, The Battle for God, Holy War, Islam, Buddha, and The Great Transformation
The Bible: The Biography by Karen Armstrong
The stories continue, showing the continuing tension between those who wished to see a historical truth in a text and those who sought what they thought of as its real ethical and mystical meaning through allegory. But as Armstrong shows, an exclusively literal interpretation of the Bible is a recent development.
Armstrong takes a tough-minded approach to alleged facts, observing for example that “the scholarly consensus is that the story of the exodus is not historical”. She doubts whether we can get beyond what the Gospels give us to assemble a historic life of Jesus.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/oct/13/society1
Both modern believers and modern atheists, Armstrong contends, have come to understand religion primarily as a set of propositions to be assented to, or a catalog of specific facts about the nature of God, the world and human life. But this approach to piety would be foreign to many premodern religious thinkers, including the greatest minds of the Christian past, from the early Fathers of the Church to medieval eminences like Thomas Aquinas.
Instead of providing the usual portrait of empiricism triumphing over superstition, Armstrong depicts an extended seduction in which believers were persuaded to embrace the “natural theology” of Isaac Newton and William Paley, which seemed to provide scientific warrant for a belief in a creator God. Convinced that “the natural laws that scientists had discovered in the universe were tangible demonstrations of God’s providential care,” Western Christians abandoned the apophatic, mythic approach to faith in favor of a pseudo?scientific rigor - and then had nowhere to turn when Darwin’s theory of evolution arrived on the scene.
An Aquinas or an Augustine would have been unfazed by the idea of evolution. But their modern successors had convinced themselves that religious truth was a literal, all-or-nothing affair, in which doctrines were the equivalent of scientific precepts, and sacred texts needed to coincide exactly with the natural sciences. The resulting crisis produced the confusions of our own day, in which biblical literalists labor to reconcile the words of Genesis with the existence of the dinosaurs, while atheists ridicule Scripture for its failure to resemble a science textbook.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/books/review/Douthat-t.html
Karen Armstrong Writes ‘Biography’ of the Bible Today scripture has a bad name. Terrorists use the Qur’an to justify atrocities, and some argue that the violence of their scripture makes Muslims chronically aggressive. Christians campaign against the teaching of evolutionary theory because it contradicts the biblical creation story. Jews argue that because God promised Canaan (modern Israel) to the descendants of Abraham, oppressive policies against the Palestinians are legitimate. There has been a scriptural revival that has intruded into public life. Secularist opponents of religion claim that scripture breeds violence, sectarianism and intolerance; that it prevents people from thinking for themselves, and encourages delusion. If religion preaches compassion, why is there so much hatred in sacred texts? Is it possible to be a ‘believer’ today when science has undermined so many biblical teachings?
Because scripture has become such an explosive issue, it is important to be clear what it is and what it is not. This biography of the Bible provides some insight into this religious phenomenon. It is, for example, crucial to note that an exclusively literal interpretation of the Bible is a recent development. Until the nineteenth century, very few people imagined that the first chapter of Genesis was a factual account of the origins of life. For centuries, Jews and Christians relished highly allegorical and inventive exegesis, insisting that a wholly literal reading of the Bible was neither possible nor desirable. They have rewritten biblical history, replaced Bible stories with new myths, and interpreted the first chapter of Genesis in surprisingly different ways.
The Jewish scriptures and the New Testament both began as oral proclamations and even after they were committed to writing, there often remained a bias towards the spoken word that is also present in other traditions. From the very beginning, people feared that a written scripture encouraged inflexibility and unrealistic, strident certainty. Religious knowledge cannot be imparted like other information, simply by scanning the sacred page. Documents became ‘scripture’ not, initially, because they were thought to be divinely inspired but because people started to treat them differently. This was certainly true of the early texts of the Bible, which became holy only when approached in a ritual context that set them apart from ordinary life and secular modes of thought.
But even more important were the spiritual disciplines that involved diet, posture and exercises in concentration, which, from a very early date, helped Jews and Christians to peruse the Bible in a different frame of mind. They were thus able to read between the lines and find something new, because the Bible always meant more than it said.
From the very beginning, the Bible had no single message. When the editors fixed the canons of both the Jewish and Christian testaments, they included competing visions and placed them, without comment, side by side. From the first, biblical authors felt free to revise the texts they had inherited and give them entirely different meaning. Later exegetes held up the Bible as a template for the problems of their time. Sometimes they allowed it to shape their world-view but they also felt free to change it and make it speak to contemporary conditions. They were not usually interested in discovering the original meaning of a biblical passage. The Bible ‘proved’ that it was holy because people continually discovered fresh ways to interpret it and found that this difficult, ancient set of documents cast light on situations that their authors could never have imagined.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16220762
A History of God By Karen Armstrong From Abraham to the Present: The 4,000-year Quest for God
This book will not be a history of the ineffable reality of God itself, which is beyond time and change, but a history of the way men and women have perceived him from Abraham to the present day. The human idea of God has a history, since it has always meant something slightly different to each group of people who have used it at various points of time. The idea of God formed in one generation by one set of human beings could be meaningless in another. Indeed, the statement: ‘I believe in God’ has no objective meaning, as such, but like any other statement it only means something in context, when proclaimed by a particular community. Consequently there is not one unchanging idea contained in the word ‘God’ but the word contains a whole spectrum of meanings, some of which are contradictory or even mutually exclusive. Had the notion of God not had this flexibility, it would not have survived to become one of the great human ideas. When one conception of God has ceased to have meaning or relevance, it has been quietly discarded and replaced by a new theology. A fundamentalist would deny this, since fundamentalism is anti-historical: it believes that Abraham, Moses and the later prophets all experienced their God in exactly the same way as people do today. Yet if we look at our three religions, it becomes clear that there is no objective view of ‘God’: each generation has to create the image of God that works for them.
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Indeed, it seems that in the ancient world people believed that it was only by participating in this divine life that they would become truly human. Earthly life was obviously fragile and overshadowed by mortality, but if men and women imitated the actions of the gods they would share to some degree their greater power and effectiveness. Thus it was said that the gods had shown men how to build their cities and temples, which were mere copies of their own homes in the divine realm. The sacred world of the gods - as recounted in myth - was not just an ideal towards which men and women should aspire but was the prototype of human existence; it was the original pattern or the archetype on which our life here below had been modelled.
The imitation of a god is still an important religious notion: resting on the Sabbath or washing somebody’s feet on Maundy Thursday - actions that are meaningless in themselves - are now significant and sacred because people believe that they were once performed by God.
These were later collated into the final text of what we know as the Pentateuch during the fifth century BCE. This form criticism has come in for a good deal of harsh treatment but nobody has yet come up with a more satisfactory theory, which explains why there are two quite different accounts of key biblical events, such as the Creation or the Flood, and why the Bible sometimes contradicts itself. The two earliest biblical authors, whose work is found in Genesis and Exodus, were probably writing during the eighth century, though some would give them an earlier date. One is known as ‘J’ because he calls his God ‘Yahweh’, the other ‘E’ since he prefers to use the more formal divine tide ‘Elohim’. By the eighth century, the Israelites had divided Canaan into two separate kingdoms. J was writing in the southern Kingdom of Judah, while E came from the northern Kingdom of Israel. (See Map p.8). We will discuss the two other sources of the Pentateuch - the Deuteronomist (D) and Priestly (P) accounts of the ancient history of Israel - in Chapter Two. We shall see that in many respects both J and E shared the religious perspectives of their neighbours in the Middle East but their accounts do show that by the eighth century BCE, the Israelites were beginning to develop a distinct vision of their own. J, for example, starts his history of God with an account of the creation of the world which, compared with the Enuma Elish, is startlingly perfunctory:
At the time when Yahweh God made earth and heaven, there was as yet no wild bush on the earth nor had any wild plant yet sprung up, for Yahweh God had not sent rain on the earth nor was there any man to till the soil. However, a flood was rising from the earth and watering all the surface of the soil. Yahweh God fashioned man (adam) of dust from the soil (adamah). Then he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and thus man became a living being. {6} This was an entirely new departure. Instead of concentrating on the creation of the world and on the prehistoric period like his pagan contemporaries in Mesopotamia and Canaan, J is more interested in ordinary historical time. There would be no real interest in creation in Israel until the sixth century BCE, when the author whom we call ‘P’ wrote his majestic account in what is now the first chapter of Genesis. J is not absolutely clear that Yahweh is the sole creator of heaven and earth. Most noticeable, however, is J’s perception of a certain distinction between man and the divine. Instead of being composed of the same divine stuff as his god, man (adam), as the pun indicates, belongs to the earth (adamah). Unlike his pagan neighbours, J does not dismiss mundane history as profane, feeble and insubstantial compared with the sacred, primordial time of the gods. He hurries through the events of prehistory until he comes to the end of the mythical period, which includes such stories as the Flood and the Tower of Babel, and arrives at the start of the history of the people of Israel.
But who is Yahweh? Did Abraham worship the same God as Moses or did he know him by a different name? This would be a matter of prime importance to us today but the Bible seems curiously vague on the subject and gives conflicting answers to this question, J says that men had worshipped Yahweh ever since the time of Adam’s grandson but in the sixth century, ‘P’ seems to suggest that the Israelites had never heard of Yahweh until he appeared to Moses in the Burning Bush. P makes Yahweh explain that he really was the same God as the God of Abraham, as though this were a rather controversial notion: he tells Moses that Abraham had called him ‘El Shaddai’ and did not know the divine name Yahweh. {7} The discrepancy does not seem to worry either the biblical writers or their editors unduly. J calls his god ‘Yahweh’ throughout: by the time he was writing, Yahweh was the God of Israel and that was all that mattered. Israelite religion was pragmatic and less concerned with the kind of speculative detail that would worry us. Yet we should not assume that either Abraham or Moses believed in their God as we do today. We are so familiar with the Bible story and the subsequent history of Israel that we tend to project our knowledge of later Jewish religion back on to these early historical personages. Accordingly, we assume that the three patriarchs of Israel - Abraham, his son Isaac and grandson Jacob - were monotheists who believed in only one God. This does not seem to have been the case. Indeed, it is probably more accurate to call these early Hebrews pagans who shared many of the religious beliefs of their neighbours in Canaan. They would certainly have believed in the existence of such deities as Marduk, Baal and Anat. They may not all have worshipped the same deity: it is possible that the God of Abraham, the ‘Fear’ or ‘Kinsman’ of Isaac and the ‘Mighty One’ of Jacob were three separate gods.
We can go further. It is highly likely that Abraham’s God was El, the High God of Canaan. The deity introduces himself to Abraham as El Shaddai (El of the Mountain), which was one of El’s traditional tides. {9} Elsewhere he is called El Elyon (The Most High God) or El of Bethel. The name of the Canaanite High God is preserved in such Hebrew names as Isra-El or Ishma-El. They experienced him in ways that would not have been unfamiliar to the pagans of the Middle East. We shall see that centuries later Israelites found the mana or ‘holiness’ of Yahweh a terrifying experience. On Mount Sinai, for example, he would appear to Moses in the midst of an awe-inspiring volcanic eruption and the Israelites had to keep their distance. In comparison, Abraham’s god El is a very mild deity. He appears to Abraham as a friend and sometimes even assumes human form. This type of divine apparition, known as an epiphany, was quite common in the pagan world of antiquity. Even though in general the gods were not expected to intervene directly in the lives of mortal men and women, certain privileged individuals in mythical times had encountered their gods face to face. The Iliad is full of such epiphanies. The gods and goddesses appear to both Greeks and Trojans in dreams, when the boundary between the human and divine worlds was believed to be lowered. At the very end of the Iliad, Priam is guided to the Greek ships by a charming young man who finally reveals himself as Hermes. {10} When the Greeks looked back to the golden age of their heroes, they felt that they had been closely in touch with the gods, who were, after all, of the same nature as human beings. These stories of epiphanies expressed the holistic pagan vision: when the divine was not essentially distinct from either nature or humanity, it could be experienced without a great fanfare. The world was full of gods, who could be perceived unexpectedly at any time, around any corner or in the person of a passing stranger. It seems that ordinary folk may have believed that such divine encounters were possible in their own lives: this may explain the strange story in the Acts of the Apostles when, as late as the first century CE, the apostle Paul and his disciple Barnabas were mistaken for Zeus and Hermes by the people of Lystra in what is now Turkey.
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We have seen, however, that not all religious people have looked to ‘God’ to provide them with an explanation for the universe. Many have seen the proofs as a red herring. Science has been felt to be threatening only by those Western Christians who got into the habit of reading the scriptures literally and interpreting doctrines as though they were matters of objective fact. Scientists and philosophers who find no room for God in their systems are usually referring to the idea of God as First Cause, a notion eventually abandoned by Jews, Muslims and Greek Orthodox Christians during the Middle Ages. The more subjective ‘God’ that they were looking for could not be proven as though it were an objective fact that was the same for everybody. It could not be located within a physical system of the universe, any more than the Buddhist nirvana.
http://www.metaphysicspirit.com/books/A%20History%20of%20God.pdf
Writers of the Bible
Biblical scholars since the 17th century have pointed to evidence that human writers, and in fact a number of different writers, composed the Bible. Mainstream Jewish and Christian organizations, including seminaries and rabbinical schools, generally embrace such scholarship-seeing the voice of God in a text compiled by human hands. In the following interview, Michael Coogan, Professor of Religious Studies at Stonehill College and Director of Publications for the Harvard Semitic Museum, offers insights into how scholars today understand how the first five books of the Bible were written.
NOVA: Most people may see the Bible as a single text, but is it? Michael Coogan: One way of thinking about the Bible is that it’s like an anthology of literature made over the course of many centuries by different people. Think of an analogy: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, which covers over a thousand years, from Beowulf into the 20th century. The Bible covers a similar span. The earliest texts in the Bible likely date to before 1000 B.C., and the latest texts go at least to the 2nd century B.C., and for Christians, into the 2nd century A.D. So it is an anthology of the literature of ancient Israel and early Judaism, and for Christians, of earliest Christianity, as well.
The first five books of the Bible, which Jews know as the Torah, are also called The Five Books of Moses. Where did the idea that Moses wrote these books come from? In the Hebrew Bible, Moses is the single most important human character, and more space is devoted to the account of Moses’ life and speeches by Moses than to anyone else in the Bible. Moses is also considered closer to God than anyone else in the Bible. And certainly by the 5th century B.C., the idea developed that Moses had written down words that God himself had spoken on Mt. Sinai. Eventually-and this didn’t happen until several centuries later-it came to be understood that Moses wrote all of the first five books of the Bible.
What were some clues that led biblical scholars to question this belief? The view that Moses had personally written down the first five books of the Bible was virtually unchallenged until the 17th century. There were a few questions raised before that. For example, the very end of the last book of the Torah, the Book of Deuteronomy, describes the death and burial of Moses. So some rabbis said Moses couldn’t have written those words himself because he was dead-perhaps Joshua, his divinely designated successor, wrote those words. But other rabbis said, no, Moses was a prophet, and God revealed to him exactly what would happen at the end of his life.
It wasn’t until the 17th century, with the rise of critical thinking in many disciplines-in science, in philosophy, and others-that people began to look at the Bible not just as a sacred text but as they would look at any other book. And they began to notice in the pages of the first five books of the Bible a lot of issues that didn’t seem consistent with the idea that Moses was their author. For example, Moses never speaks in the first person; Moses doesn’t say, “I went up on Mt. Sinai.” There are also a lot of repetitions-the same stories told from different perspectives. And there are also many, many inconsistencies; as the same stories are retold, many of the details change.
So scholars began to think not just that Moses was not the author, but that ordinary men and women (mostly men) had written these pages.
What are some obvious inconsistencies, for instance in the Noah story? In the story of the flood, in Genesis chapters 6 to 9, there seem to be two accounts that have been combined, and they have a number of inconsistencies. For example, how many of each species of animals is Noah supposed to bring into the ark? One text says two, a pair of every kind of animal. Another text says seven pairs of the clean animals and only two of the unclean animals.
Why would the biblical writers compiling the various accounts include such clear discrepancies? Even before the Bible became the Bible, even before these texts became official canonical scriptures, there was an idea of preserving ancient traditions. Preserving ancient traditions was more important than a kind of superficial consistency of plot or detail.
THE DOCUMENTARY HYPOTHESIS What is the Documentary Hypothesis? The Documentary Hypothesis is a theory to explain the many repetitions, inconsistencies, and anachronisms in the first five books of the Bible. In its classic form, it says that underlying the Bible are several different ancient documents or sources, which biblical writers and editors combined at various stages into the Torah as we have it today.
What’s the earliest source? The earliest of these sources is the one known as J, which many scholars initially dated to the 10th century B.C., the time of David and Solomon, or perhaps a bit later, to the 9th century, after the split of the United Kingdom into the Kingdom of Israel in the north and the Kingdom of Judah in the south. Some scholars today, however, question that dating, placing J as late as the 4th century B.C.
How did it get the name “J”? The J source gets its name because it uses the divine name “Yahweh.” In the stories about Abraham, for instance, God is called Yahweh. The German word for Yahweh is spelled with a J instead of a Y. And the German scholars who initially worked on the Documentary Hypothesis called the source “J.”
People reading the Bible today in English don’t come across the name Yahweh. Why is that? Tell us more about the name. It’s a very mysterious name. In Jewish tradition it came to be considered so sacred that it was never to be pronounced. When you ran across this name in the Bible, written with its four consonants, which in English would be YHWH, you never read what that name was, you read some other word, usually a word that means “Lord.” The Hebrew word is Adonai. This pious substitution became standard in Jewish tradition and also in Christian tradition. Almost all translations of the Bible say “The Lord.”
It’s also a mysterious name because we don’t know exactly what it means. It seems to have been the personal name of the god of Israel. His title, in a sense, was God, and his name was these four letters, which we think were probably pronounced something like Yahweh.
How does the Bible, in the sections that are attributed to this oldest source, J, depict Yahweh when he first appears? The earliest poems we have in the Bible depict the God of Israel, Yahweh, as a god who comes from the south, surrounded by an entourage of heavenly warriors who fight with him. He appears on mountains with all the accoutrements of a storm-the mountains quake, and the Earth shakes, and the clouds drop down water. He is, in effect, a storm god, like many other storm gods of the ancient Mediterranean world. J uses some of this language, and also, J describes Yahweh as a god personally involved with humans, like deities in myths of other cultures.
THE E AND D SOURCES So the J source used the name Yahweh, but other sources used a different name for God. Tell us about the so-called E source. In Genesis, in many passages, God is called not Yahweh but Elohim. And some of these passages were identified in the Documentary Hypothesis as coming from a source called E, for Elohim. The E source is very difficult to characterize. The J source has a fairly coherent narrative, but the E source is extremely fragmentary. Some scholars even wonder if there is an E source.
In the classic understanding, the E source seems to have a northern origin, because the stories in the book of Genesis are frequently set in the northern part of Israel, in what became the northern Kingdom of Israel.
Does E depict God differently than J does? Yes. In the J source, God appears directly to people. For example, he speaks directly to Abraham-he even comes to visit him and has dinner with him in his tent. In the E source, however, God is more remote. God doesn’t appear in person to human beings, but God appears to them in dreams or sends messengers, later to be called angels, or sends prophets, but doesn’t deal with human beings directly.
What’s the next source, according to the chronology of the Documentary Hypothesis? The third source is called D, and it takes its name from the Book of Deuteronomy. It is found almost exclusively in the Book of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy has a very distinctive style, which is very different from that found in the earlier books of the Torah. It also has important themes that, although found earlier in the Torah, are given special emphasis in Deuteronomy, especially the insistence on the exclusive worship of the God of Israel.
Is it known when this source was written? Many scholars think that it was written in the late 8th century B.C. It was subsequently used by King Josiah, in the late 7th century B.C., in support of his effort to unify the kingdom and to enforce religious observance.
What does the Bible itself-the later books of the Bible-tell us about Josiah and his link to Deuteronomy? We are told in the Book of Kings that King Josiah learned that a scroll had been discovered in the temple archives. The scroll was brought to him and read out loud before him. And the narrative goes on to say that, as the scroll was being read, Josiah began to weep, because he realized that it was a sacred text containing divine commands that the people had been breaking.
After he heard the scroll read, King Josiah ordered a sweeping religious reform throughout his kingdom. And the details of that reform, as described in the Book of Kings, correspond in many details to the divine requirements in the Book of Deuteronomy.
What were some of the requirements? Josiah required, for example, that all of the shrines to other gods and goddesses throughout the land be destroyed. He also forbade the worship of Yahweh, the God of Israel, at any place other than Jerusalem. The Book of Deuteronomy says, “You shall worship the Lord, your God, only at one place, at the place he will choose.”
Scholars have wondered about Josiah’s motivation. Was it simply his piety? Or was there a political motivation as well? By requiring that all Israelites worship Yahweh only in Jerusalem, Josiah brought under his direct control the enormous religious establishment of ancient Israel, which up until that time had been scattered in various centers of worship throughout the land.
How does Deuteronomy describe Israel’s relationship with God? In the Book of Deuteronomy there seems to be a new understanding of God’s relationship with Israel and Israel’s relationship with its God. One of the terms that Deuteronomy uses repeatedly is the term “love.” “You should love the Lord, your God, because he has loved you. He has loved you more than any other nation.” So the divine love for Israel requires a corresponding loyalty to God, an exclusive loyalty to God. And Deuteronomy, more than any other part of the Bible, is insistent that only the God of Israel is to be worshipped.
THE FINAL SYNTHESIS What events led to the last major phase of the writing of the Torah? In the 6th century B.C. the Babylonians invaded the Kingdom of Judah twice. In the second invasion, which began in 587 B.C. and ended in 586 B.C., they destroyed the city of Jerusalem. It was the end of a way of life. It was the end of control of the Promised Land by the descendants of Abraham for many, many centuries. It was the end of the dynasty founded by David. The Temple, which was supposed to be the only place where Yahweh was worshipped, was destroyed, and a significant part of the population was taken to exile in Babylon. It was a crisis of enormous proportion.
The great Israeli biblical scholar Yehezkel Kaufmann said it is a watershed, it is when ancient Israel ends and Judaism begins. Amongst the exiles from Jerusalem to Babylon were priests from the temple. And they seem to have brought with them their sacred documents, their sacred traditions. According to the Documentary Hypothesis, they consolidated these traditions-they edited them, and they constructed what became the first version of the Torah.
These last writers, the priestly writers, are known as P, right? Yes. So it was P who took all these earlier traditions-the J source, the E source, the D source, and other sources as well-and combined them into what we know as the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. The P source, in fact, frames the Torah with its own material: The first chapter of the first book of the Bible, Genesis, is from the P source, and most of the last chapter of the last book of the Torah, the Book of Deuteronomy, is also from the P source.
Coogan and other scholars think that a group they call the Priestly Writers compiled the work of previous authors during the Babylonian Exile. Enlarge Photo credit: © WGBH Educational Foundation After the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, the Israelites retained their faith. That seems remarkable. Yes. In the ancient world, if your country was destroyed by another country, it meant their gods were more powerful than yours. And the natural thing to do was to worship the more powerful god. But the survivors of the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. did not give up the worship of Yahweh. They continued to worship Yahweh and struggled to understand how this could have happened.
One explanation was that they were being punished deservedly for their failure to live up to the covenant obligations. Probably one of the reasons why the priests collected the ancient traditions and shaped them into the Torah was so that these covenant obligations would not be forgotten again.
So they kept the faith that, as long as they were loyal to God, God would protect them and return them one day to the Promised Land. Yes. One of the pervasive themes in the Torah is the theme of exile and return. Over and over again, individuals and groups leave their land only to return. Abraham goes down to Egypt and comes out of Egypt. Jacob goes to a foreign land and returns. The Israelites go to Egypt and get out. And for the exiles in Babylon in the 6th century B.C., that theme must have resonated very powerfully. God, who had acted on their behalf in the past, will presumably do so again.
To assure that divine protection, the priestly writers stress aspects of religious observance that were not tied down to the land of Israel itself, that were not attached to any particular institution such as the temple, that did not require a monarchy-all of those had ceased to exist. So the P tradition emphasizes observances such as the Sabbath observance, such as dietary observance, such as circumcision. You don’t need to be in the land of Israel to keep the Sabbath. You don’t need a temple or a king or a priesthood to observe the dietary laws. Any Jew anywhere in the world can do that. So the priestly tradition, writing for these exiles, was teaching them how to be faithful to the covenant.
Moses was very probably using pscyhedelic drugs, says cognitive psychologist
According to Hebrew University (Jerusalem) cognitive psychologist Benny Shanon, Moses was very probably under the influence of psychedelic drugs when he heard God deliver the Ten Commandments and when he saw the burning bush. In a study published in the Time and Mind Journal of Philosophy, Shanon says that such mind-altering substances played an integral role in the religious rites of Israelites in Biblical times (1). Shanon points out that the acacia tree, mentioned frequently in the Bible, contains one of the most psychedelic substances known to man. Shanon developed this theory after experiencing firsthand the effects of a hallucinogen, ayahuasca, used in religious rituals in Brazil. The experiences of Moses include the hallmarks of a psychelic experience.
Exodus of the Senses:
The Bible: The burning bush burned without being ‘consumed’ Professor Shannon: Drugs alter the perception of time
The Bible: Thunder, lightning and the blaring of a trumpet accompanied the delivery of the Ten Commandments Professor Shannon: Drugs blur the senses and cause deep religious and spiritual feelings
The Bible: Moses’s skin shone after an encounter with God Professor Shannon: Skin and eyes often appear brighter when under the influence
The Bible: Moses’s brother Aaron’s rod was transformed into a serpent Professor Shannon: Objects changing into snakes are a common feature of hallucinations
Benny Shanon:
The Amazonian brew ayahuasca is made out of two plants, each alone incapable of inducing any psychoactive effect. The remarkable finding is that in the Near East there grow two plants with the very same molecules contained by the two Amazonian plants. You mention only the tree (not bush) Acacia, but it is crucial for this to be conjoined with the bush Peganum harmala
I must stress that the use of psychoactive plants I have encountered in the Amazon is always embedded in religious and/or medicinal rituals. In traditional Amerindian societies the rituals were very strict and directed by a specialist (a shaman or healer), and demanded prior preparation. Remarkably, similar preparation is specified in the book of Exodus in conjunction with the Mount Sinai theophany. The plants were universally regarded as sacred, even divine, and held to be the source of true knowledge and the very foundation of the cultures in question.
I agree with Rabbi Pete Tobias (Face to Faith) that the spiritual, cultural and historical import of the biblical events, and of their associated texts and religious messages, is not diminished by their association with psychoactive plants. The plants are just instruments which induce higher sensitivity, greater insight, spiritual sentiments and creativity.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/mar/26/religion
Manna From Heaven by Steve Kubby
There are a great many people who would never consider the use of visionary plants to be a spiritual experience. These people believe that spiritual experiences must come directly from God and that the use of visionary plants goes against the teachings of the Bible. Contrary to this notion, the Bible never explicitly prohibits the use of visionary plants or potions. What you will find however, is many curious references to a spiritual food sent down from heaven by God, called manna. The Bible never tells us exactly what manna was and where it came from, but there are many Old Testament passages which describe its physical qualities and conditions associated with its appearance. The Bible’s first reference to manna is in the Book of Exodus as the children of Israel are fleeing from Egypt and following Moses into the wilderness. After six weeks of wandering, they began complaining to Moses that they are tired and hungry. What happens next is truly extraordinary:
Then said the LORD unto Moses, Behold, I will vain bread from heaven for you; and the people shall go out and gather a certain rate every day, that I may prove them, whether they will walk in my law or no (16:4). And when the dew that lay was gone up, behold, upon the face of the wilderness there lay a small round thing, as small as the hoar frost on the ground (16:14). And when the children of Israel saw if, they said one to another It is manna: for they wist not what it was. And Moses said unto them, This is the bread which the Lord hath given you to eat.
When I read this passage, I was struck by the fact that manna easily fits the description of psilocybe mushrooms. For one thing magic mushrooms are small and round, and since they sprout so rapidly they would seem to appear overnight, as if out of the sky. Also, anyone harvesting them would immediately notice that they turn blue where torn and had no roots, giving more reason to believe that the mushrooms were of celestial origin. Note that manna does not just fall from heaven, but instead it is described as coming with the frost and dew, during the wet seasons. These are the precise weather conditions for mushrooms to thrive. And finally, manna is described as a bread. Although translations have obscured the intent of this passage, it seems to be a description of how to find and identify manna and distinguish it from other non-psychoactive (or possibly lethal) mushrooms. Look for the small round things which are like bread, come with the rain, and seem to have heavenly (bluish) coloring. Psilocybe mushrooms also sprout in tiny pin heads which branch out in all directions and bear a resemblance to hoar frost.
It is also interesting to note that Moses tells the children of Israel that manna comes directly from Heaven to test them on whether or not they will walk in God’s law. Here is evidence that manna was endowed with unusual spiritual powers, like those of magic mushrooms. However, manna does not automatically confer spiritual power. Instead, it serves as a test. Magic mushrooms would provide visionary experiences that would certainly test all who ingested them. Moses also said that the manna is literally the “bread of the lord” which is remarkably similar to the literal Aztec name for psilocybe mushrooms, “flesh of the gods.”
Across the gulf of thousands of years the Bible transmits and accurate and detailed description of manna waiting for the time when the message can be decoded and manna can again fulfill its role as a celestial messenger. Manna was the basis of the Jewish covenant with God. Indeed, it is this covenant and the use of manna which has set the Jews apart as the Chosen People. The Bible is not the message, it only points the way. Manna is the holy sacrament that provides the means for God to “prove them, whether they will walk in my law, or no.”
But how and why did the manna suddenly appear? Again referring to the Bible, it is clear that the children of Israel had journeyed to a land where there was dew in the morning. As a large, nomadic tribe, the Israelites brought a lot of cattle and sheep together in the area. That meant a great deal of manure. The change of climate from the arid lands of Egypt to the dewy climate of the wilderness created ideal conditions for the propagation and spread of psilocybe mushrooms in livestock dung.
In Exodus 12:19-20, we find more references to manna.
And Moses said, Let no man leave of it till the morning (16:19). Notwithstanding they harkened not unto Moses, but some of them left of it until the morning, and it bred worms and stank: and Moses was wroth with them (16:20). And they gathered it every morning, every man according to his eating. and when the sun waxed hot it melted…(16:21). Anyone familiar with wild mushrooms knows that they go bad very quickly and shrivel up under the heat of the sun, exactly like manna.
It seems curious that Moses recognized the manna instantly when the children of Israel showed it to him. He knew that the manna would spoil if it was not picked and eaten in the morning. But how did Moses know about manna? Perhaps Moses knew about manna because he had already encountered the mushroom at the time he saw the burning bush. Referring to an earlier period of his life, we find that Moses:
…kept a flock of Jethro, his father in-law the priest of Midiam: and he led the flock to the back side of the desert, and came to the mountain of God, even to Horeb (3:1). And the angel of the LORD appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed (3:2). Had Moses eaten the sacred mushroom while camped at the mountain? Here again we can only speculate that manure from his flock and a change in climate had created the proper environment for the mushrooms to fruit. Perhaps Moses ingested the mushrooms purely by accident, or perhaps his father in law, who we know was also a priest, had introduced Moses to the mushroom. Archaeological evidence of psychedelic mushroom use in Biblical times is well documented by Terence McKenna, so it is reasonable to conclude that Moses could have had some experience with visionary mushrooms.1
Later, in Numbers 11:6-9, manna is again described in terms that are remarkably similar to magic mushrooms:
But now our soul is dried away: there is nothing at all, beside this manna, before our eyes. And the manna was as coriander seed, and the colour thereof as the colour of bdelliaum. And the people went about and gathered it, and ground it in mills, or beat it in a mortar and baked it in pans: and made cakes of it: and the taste of it was as the taste of fresh oil. And when the dew fell upon the camp in the night, the manna fell upon it. Here we find manna described as before our eyes, having a neutral taste like fresh oil, and once again, the Bible mentions that manna appearing in the morning when the dew fell. The Old Testament even tells us what manna looks like, the manna was as coriander seed, and the colour thereof. When psilocybe mushrooms are dried, their range of colors is virtually identical to dried coriander seed. In both cases, with mushrooms and coriander seeds, we see great similarities in the texture, color, tones, contrasts and general visual appearance. The Children of Israel must have given great thought about how to transmit the appearance of manna so as to aid future generations who might encounter it. However, mushrooms were a mystery to the Hebrews and they were unable to predict where manna could be found. Little did they realize that the manure from their cattle was providing a means for the mushroom to find its way into their mountain campsites.
If manna is indeed the psilocybin mushroom, then this means that the Koran, Bible, and Torah were all inspired by psychedelically induced visions. The very foundations upon which these religions rest were derived from the mushroom experience. Moses and the children of Israel used the mushrooms as true sacraments to communicate with a Higher Power, also known as Allah, God and Yahweh. The discovery that manna is real and is available to us today means that like children of Israel we too can use manna to experience the joy, wisdom and spiritual renewal of the Chosen People.