Normative Judaism, or evolution from/after the Septuagint?

Discussion about the Hebrew Bible, Septuagint, pseudepigrapha, Philo, Josephus, Talmud, Dead Sea Scrolls, archaeology, etc.
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stephan happy huller
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Re: Hadrian and the Christians

Post by stephan happy huller »

I know but give me an example of some monstrous 'Franken-Judaism' that emerged from a variant reading in the Septuagint or some related text. As it is I don't see how you get from the idea of 'translation' to total transformation of Judaism. I can say fuck in twenty different languages it's still the same concept.

You see for me. I see this as an example of the cart leading the horse. You want to find some opening that allows for massive variation in meaning and interpretation so as to open the door to a more interesting possibility for Judaism. But sadly its not true. One of the most boring religions out there.
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MrMacSon
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Re: Re: Evolution from/after the Septuagint

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I'm not advocating some 'monstrous Franken-Judaism'. I'm working on a preliminary hypothesis that a myriad of variants evolved from a number of factors over a number of generations, with the evolution of variants and development of apocrypha accelerating in the 1st C.
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stephan happy huller
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Re: Hadrian and the Christians

Post by stephan happy huller »

Ok. But I think I am aware of all the different types of variation that have ever been known to exist within the Israelite religion. Perhaps there are forms we don't know anything about. But my experience, my knowledge of the subject matter leads me to the conclusion that - without a messiah who turns everything upside down - it's pretty much the same boring religion, in a hundred different shades of black.
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Peter Kirby
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Re: Hadrian and the Christians

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MrMacSon wrote:I think the apocrypha and pseudepigraphic apocalyptic literature had a lot more influence on the development of Christianity than has been generally acknowledged
I agree, except for the 'than has been generally acknowledged' part, because my own impression is that it is generally held as a huge influence, at least in terms of the ideas that are captured in literary form in the apocrypha/pseudepigrapha... but ... that's just based on the stuff I personally have stuck to reading so far, I guess. You can start with the fact that Jude refers to 1 Enoch, for a simple fact of literary influence, and get the real meat and bones of the reality of this just from the numerous chasms in the development of thought between the Old and New Testaments that are filled in with bridges from the ideas found in that apocryphal and pseudepigraphical literature.
stephan happy huller wrote:You can't just make shit up. It's not a creative writing exercise. There are precedents that are established and people have to obey otherwise they will quite literally take you in a field and kill you. Only a messianic figure can rewrite the law and the established exegesis of that material.
Now this is a paragraph that probably has something to it but suffers from stating exactly what, qualified how? When is it rewriting the law, and when is it just a continuing tradition of exegesis in which various schools and teachers differ on the interpretation of the law? You can point to edge cases where somebody says God doesn't exist or that Abraham died childless, or something really so crazy it would either not come up or would elicit such a murderous reaction, but you can also point to the "oral Torah" and the many disagreements of rabbinic Judaism documented in the Talmud.
stephan happy huller wrote:The same thing is found in Islam. You can't just make shit up.
And, since you mentioned Islam, there's a joke that the shariah is like the US tax code; there's a loophole for everything. One guy in Egypt tried to make a loophole for men working with women alone together by making the coworkers intimately familiar, as like a son to a mother, by suckling. The disagreement wasn't about his interpretation of the law but rather his disregard of common sense. Women from north Africa went on sexual jihad outside of marriage in order to rally the troops fighting in Syria. Creative interpretation that is controversial and finds something of a following certainly happens.

Honestly, past this point in the conversation, I couldn't parse the argument at all really, so that's all I have to say about this stuff for now.
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MrMacSon
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Re: Evolution from/after the Septuagint

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See the current sections Influence of Hellenistic Judaism and the next section 'Decline of the 'Hellenistai' and partial conversion to Christianity' in Wikipedia,

and the section on The First Book of Maccabees "held as canonical scripture by some Christian churches (including Catholic, Orthodox and Coptic churches), but not by Protestant denominations"
In the first chapter, Alexander the Great conquers the territory of Judea, only to be eventually succeeded by the Seleucid Antiochus IV Epiphanes. After successfully invading the Ptolemaic kingdom of Egypt, Antiochus IV captures Jerusalem and removes the sacred objects from the Jerusalem temple, slaughtering many Jews. He then imposes a tax and establishes a fortress in Jerusalem.

Antiochus then tries to suppress public observance of Jewish laws, in an attempt to secure control over the Jews. He desecrates the Temple by setting up an "abomination of desolation" (that is, establishing rites of pagan observance in the Temple, or sacrificing an unclean animal on the altar in the Holy of Holies)

... [snip] ... But 1 Maccabees also insists that there were many Jews who sought out or welcomed the introduction of Greek culture.

....
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stephan happy huller
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Re: Hadrian and the Christians

Post by stephan happy huller »

There is no point to this discussion because it is a personal dispute. That's why you can't sense any substance to it.
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MrMacSon
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Re: Re: Evolution from/after the Septuagint

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stephan happy huller wrote: ... my knowledge of the subject matter leads me to the conclusion that - without a messiah who turns everything upside down - it's pretty much the same boring religion, in a hundred different shades of black.
Sure. There seems to have been development of lots of different stories about various manifestations of messiahs, as seen with the various Gnostics/apocrypha.
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MrMacSon
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Re: Evolution from/after the Septuagint

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Peter Kirby wrote:
MrMacSon wrote:I think the apocrypha and pseudepigraphic apocalyptic literature had a lot more influence on the development of Christianity than has been generally acknowledged
I agree, except for the 'than has been generally acknowledged' part, because my own impression is that it is generally held as a huge influence, at least in terms of the ideas that are captured in literary form in the apocrypha/pseudepigrapha... but ... that's just based on the stuff I personally have stuck to reading so far, I guess. You can start with the fact that Jude refers to 1 Enoch, for a simple fact of literary influence, and get the real meat and bones of the reality of this just from the numerous chasms in the development of thought between the Old and New Testaments that are filled in with bridges from the ideas found in that apocryphal and pseudepigraphical literature.
OK, but I have not seen much reference to that in my readings or on fora. Certainly when I tried to refer to it in HAR, nobody engaged with it or supported it.
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Re: Evolution from/after the Septuagint

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MrMacSon wrote:OK, but I have not seen much reference to that in my readings or on fora. Certainly when I tried to refer to it in HAR, nobody engaged with it or supported it.
Okay. There are certainly writers that don't make good enough use of it. I think it will be referenced frequently whenever a discussion gets into Second Temple Jewish messianism, Hellenistic Judaism, the context of the New Testament, or the intertestamental literature specifically.
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MrMacSon
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Re: Evolution from/after the Septuagint

Post by MrMacSon »

Peter Kirby wrote:
MrMacSon wrote: ... the interTestamental literature ..
I like that categorisation
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