Plato and the Pentateuch

[neilgodfrey]

So please answer the hitherto unanswered question. As someone who believes that Jesus didn't exist and the reports about him were all made up why is it "obvious" that with neither the Pentateuch n

I read as far as I quoted and refer you back to my point about you simply refusing to even read my earlier replies to your queries and claims. You ought to know well enough a long time ago that I do not hold the views you keep saying I have. Nothing personal, you tell me -- I am an ally of evil, with no capacity for a sense of fairness, grew up in an evil cult, do not believe anything mainstream sees as core ideas on principle, am full of vanity.... piss off, huller --- you are are nothing but a troll here who by your own confession refuses to read what might challenge your ideas and you obviously have no capacity for even the most fundamental level of comprehension of the simplest facts and statements both here and in scholarly literature. go start another thread that only you ever reads and replies to a score of times -- talking to yourself. Everyone is happy when you do that.

[MrMacSon]

... As someone who believes that Jesus didn't exist and the reports about him were all made up why is it "obvious" that with neither the Pentateuch nor the writings of Plato surviving before 270 BCE that the Jewish writings were dependent on Plato and not the other way around?

• That’s an illogical nonsequitur. A conflation of two disparate concepts
  
  The rest of your post is also ranting nonsense.

[neilgodfrey]

(And NG makes ad hominems right before condemning ad hominems.)

Oi! That's an ad hominem comment you are making, Stephen!!

[neilgodfrey]

... As someone who believes that Jesus didn't exist and the reports about him were all made up why is it "obvious" that with neither the Pentateuch nor the writings of Plato surviving before 270 BCE that the Jewish writings were dependent on Plato and not the other way around?

• That’s an illogical nonsequitur. A conflation of two disparate concepts
  
  The rest of your post is also ranting nonsense.

Oh my god -- I'm glad I didn't read it that far at first. SA obviously has not grasped a thing that has been said by way of the rationale for the argument and has simply ignored or glossed away earlier explanations as if they were never posted. I used to try to take the time with him but have since had the misfortune of having to learn for myself not about his ignorance and what he calls his being "dumb" but about his arrogance and pride in those faults -- even using the term "smart" as an insult! -- and his wilful refusal to actually read or even ask about the evidence set forth in Gmirkin's works. He is proud of his refusal to open his mind and learn any other point of view. And he is arrogant in his treatment of others who have a different view or whom he suspects of being "smarter". I have no time for the arrogance and wilful -- wilful -- ignorance. He is only comfortable sitting back in his "dumb anti-intellectualism" and imagining all sorts of character and motivational defects in those who have actually studied and critiqued the scholarship.

[StephenGoranson]

Galileo made empirical observations.
That is different than a model based on proposed literary parallels.

In the introduction to The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn: Incommensurability in Science (U. Chicago, 2022), the editor, Bojana Mladenovic, wrote (page xx):
"The reception of _Structure_ was not what Kuhn was hoping for. In his view, both his critics and would-be followers seriously misunderstood his book." [then note 30]

In later writings, after trying several explanations of his use of "paradigm" only within the history of science, Kuhn even tried out replacement words. Page 277-278 [though the index is mistaken in giving page 279] note 29.

[Secret Alias]

1. no manuscripts of the Pentateuch before 270 BCE, manuscripts as recent as possibly 25 years or so of 270 BCE
2. no manuscripts of Plato before 270 BCE, manuscripts as recent as 500 years of 270 BCE (I think Julius Africanus had falsified manuscripts found to 222 CE)

Why does it follow, given the arguments against Jesus's existence based on similar arguments, that the Jews stole from Plato? The so-called "mythicists" should at least be open to the idea of Socrates, Plato not being historical figures. It isn't even considered. At the very least "missing" Jewish manuscripts aren't as "telling" as we've been told. There aren't a lot of important manuscripts from before the Hellenistic period.

As I have said before this theory bandied about in this forum is a more sophisticated mountainman hypothesis with a lot of inuendo and very little evidence in its favor. The smoking gun of a lack of manuscript evidence is hardly worth mentioning as the "source" of Judaism suffers from a similar situation too.

[Secret Alias]

I think people at the forum spend a lot of time alone. Here's what I see as the problem.

1. Plato almost certainly had an existence before 270 BCE
2. Platonic writings almost certainly existed before 270 BCE

but also

3. the Pentateuch almost certainly existed before 270 BCE
4. Judaism as the sacrificial/counting of sabbatical years/priestly religion almost certainly existed before 270 BCE

The idea of saying "there are no copies of the Pentateuch from before 270 BCE" as a reason to doubt (3) and (4) only works because scholars of early Judaism aren't so petty to say "they same thing applies to Plato and (1) and (2)." I am that petty.

[neilgodfrey]

Galileo made empirical observations.
That is different than a model based on proposed literary parallels.

Literary parallels are real and empirically discerned, verifiable by observation.

The challenges are to know how best to describe those observations, including the functions of the observed parallels, and then proposing and then testing hypotheses to explain them.

That does not mean all parallels point to borrowing. Borrowing, direct and indirect influences -- these are far from the only possible hypotheses for what we observe, even in parallels found between cultures that have had no known historical links with one another.

If one is going to refute a hypothesis for a specific set of parallels then one needs to know what the datasets consist of first of all. That can only be discovered by reading the relevant works.

[StephenGoranson]

I have read much of RE Gmirkin's publications and online writing. Even if I were to read every single word, REG has already declared, here on Feb. 13, 2023, a fallback position: that I have an "...inability to recognize or follow an argument."
From that point of view, apparently, many others have such inability, too.
Again, if someone does not accept REG's c.273-272 model, does that necessarily mean that they did not understand it?

[ABuddhist]

I have read much of RE Gmirkin's publications and online writing. Even if I were to read every single word, REG has already declared, here on Feb. 13, 2023, a fallback position: that I have an "...inability to recognize or follow an argument."
From that point of view, apparently, many others have such inability, too.

You are wrong. You, rather than many other people addressing Gmirkin's argument, have repeatedly revealed through your words here 4 major flaws in your comprehension skills which in turn reveal your inability to recognize or follow an argument.

1. You have misrepresented views, as presented by Gmirkin and others, in order to make your views seem stronger and their views seem weaker and easier to refute. You did this with, among other things, whether the inscribed silver amulets count as representing a non-written tradition, whether having the inscribed silver amulets indicate in their texts that they came from a written text would require the amults to include chapter and verse numbers.

2. You have repeatedly descended to ad hominem insinuations against people here, including Gmirkin, whom you are trying to smear through association with Armstrongism and the CIA, rather than honestly addressing Gmirkin's arguments. This includes me, whom you have condemned for using the screenname ABuddhist even though many people within this forum use pseudonyms even less relevant to their identities. Or is the user Ulan really Kandive the Golden's nephew, for example?

3. You have at times attempted to refute Gmirkin's argument through appeal to subjective consequences - namely, the allegation, which I disagree with, that Gmirkin's argument, if true, would trivialize Hebrew culture - rather than honestlyu addressing Gmirkin's argument.

4. Most damaging to your ability to follow Gmirkin's argument, you have made claims related to Gmirkin's arguments which are false and which less charitable people ay accuse of being lies. You have falsely alleged that Gmirkin was endorsing Lockwood's model about Brahmi's orgins when Gmirkin's words about Lockwood - all of which were written within this website as far as I am aware - merely mentioned Lockwood's model. You also claimed that there was no controversy about Brahmi's originating from pre-Hellenistic times - even after I provided citations revealing at minimum that such issues are unsettled. Inbdeed, you selectively quoted a passage from one of the sources which I quoted from in order to suggest that Brahmi is still regarded as pre-Hellenistic in invention.

Only if you provide proof that many or all of the other people who disagree with Gmirkin engage in similar flaws will you be able to justify asserting that to disagree with Gmirkin is to be unable to follow or recognize an argument.

Lest anyone think that these words are revealing me to be not a Buddhist, there is a Buddhist tradition of harshly denouncing and refuting false positions advocated by non-Buddhists. Livia Kohn's "Laughing at the Dao", a collection of Buddhist anti-Daoist polemics from China, is an excellent exxample of such rhetoric in written form.