Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

There's the infamous Seneca-Paul letter exchange which from the 4th century for more than a thousand years was passed off as genuine by the Nicene and Post Fathers. In fact it prefaced the literature of Seneca as circulated by the Christian education system. So the point is that forgery and fraud o...

Something of relevance to how we respond to challenges to our long-held beliefs:

You're not going to believe what I'm about to tell you....

video version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_aTN3yKOkY

It's true for me -- I know too well.

You raise the questions about historical methods and how historians work -- across the board for all questions that they investigate. Others have attempted to discuss these questions with you before. But we have a natural inbuilt resistance to new ideas and any challenge to our formed views.

However in principle it is as hard evidence as the archaeological, whose unambiguous nature I feel you exaggerate. If there is no evidence for X then is it an exaggeration to say that anything we posit about life, rules, beliefs must be speculative or hypothetical? I do not say that hypothetical ar...

If we think of the Pentateuch as something more like the Communist Manifesto, then, IMO, things start to make a lot more sense. Just one more then I'll (really) finish .... I think you are right insofar as the result of the creation of the Torah was an emergent consciousness that was motivated to f...

StephenGoranson wrote: ↑Fri Jun 09, 2023 11:06 am you misread again

I'm sure you can correct me and explain how so.

I should add that I think you are correct insofar as the motivation that led to the creation of the Pentateuch was -- at least for some of the authors -- a desire to resist Hellenism. The Macedonians introduced dramatically in-your-face foreign ideas and customs to the peoples of Palestine. My conse...

If we think of the Pentateuch as something more like the Communist Manifesto, then, IMO, things start to make a lot more sense. Or we can be misled by anachronism. The Persian empire is overtaken. Palestine goes into disarray, with the region going back and fourth between Ptolemaic and Seleucid &qu...

But describing an ideal state is not the same thing as "advocating" for or "realistically calling out for and garnering support for". Again, we return to the ideological nature of what are classified as ancient "law codes". Josephus, for instance, accused the independe...

Of course REG's statement clearly refers to pre-Pentateuchal views -- where they conflicted with the new Torah those old ideas "would disappear". It is simply a bizarre twisting of REG's words to try to suggest that post-Pentateuchal debates invalidate REG's statement. REG never said that ...