Plato and the Pentateuch

[ABuddhist]

"However, a new body of material has recently come to light that seems to support the older theory that Brahmi existed before Mauryan times, that is, in the fourth century B.C. or even earlier."
Page 12, Richard Salomon, Indian Epigraphy, a Guide..., Oxford University Press, 1998.

Why is it I wonder that you omit Salomon's remarks in the same paragraph that the inscribed potsherds may be intrusive to that strata and may actually belong to a later period?

Furthermore, the passage which I quoted came from later in his book, suggesting that Salomon did not regard the evidence as proving that Brahmi was pre-Mauryan.

[neilgodfrey]

But given this is the humanities and nothing matters yes you can keep pointing to this or that "bit of evidence" (which isn't "evidence" per se but just a log which keeps the theory afloat).

Wait. Are you actually condemning the practise of citing evidence in order to support a theory?

He does, you know. He complained that when one responds to his arguments with facts and references from a range of sources one makes it pointless for him to continue the discussion:

I don't get it. But somehow the answer is to be found on a certain page of Grimkin's work or a footnote or something that was said in another book or a review somewhere or ...

What's the point.

A strange fellow. I find my time here much more pleasant when I avoid bothering to read any of his comments.

[Russell Gmirkin]

<<Nothing worth quoting>>

Stephen Goranson’s approach to my research is highly reminiscent, in my opinion, of contemporary responses to Galileo’s research in the early 1600s. You will recall, Galileo was a scientific innovator, a mathematicus who wrote a number of books regarding discoveries he made by means of telescopic observations: the mountains of the moon, the moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus (which proved the orbit of Venus around the sun), and several others. He was an advocate of the heliocentric model of the solar system, a paradigm that ran counter to the Ptolemaic geocentric paradigm of the Catholic Church and contemporary university scholarship that held the earth to be the center of the universe. He famously had debates with his fellow scholars and with the Church, and was tried more than once by the Inquisition, who finally forced him in 1633 to renounce on pain of death his heretical scientific discoveries that ran counter to biblical teachings and Catholic doctrine, and to abstain from teaching his heliocentric views. He remained under house arrest from 1633 until his death in 1642.

His views quite obviously did not change the majority views of his contemporaries, but are now universally accepted. Why? Because they were right, and he had the evidence to prove it.

But who accepted the evidence during his lifetime? Basically, one could divide up his contemporary into two opposing camps: those who looked at his evidence, and those who did not. Kepler and other astronomers, of course, agreed with his conclusions. Jesuit astronomers, though initially skeptical and quite hostile to his scientific viewpoint, which ran counter to Church teachings, were won over, for a very simple reason: they obtained quality telescopes, they checked his observations, and confirmed that he was in fact correct.

The other group included prominent theologians, philosophers (that is, natural philosophers) and other scholars. These educated elites (or shall we say elitists) rejected his views because of their adherence to Aristotelian philosophy, Ptolemaic astronomy and Catholic doctrine. Quite famously, and not coincidentally, they adamantly refused to look through Galileo’s telescope to see for themselves the evidence he put forward in his books, despite given the opportunity. Galileo wrote about them as follows in a famous letter to Kepler:

My dear Kepler, I wish that we might laugh at the remarkable stupidity of the common herd. What do you have to say about the principal philosophers of this academy who are filled with the stubbornness of an asp and do not want to look at either the planets, the moon or the telescope, even though I have freely and deliberately offered them the opportunity a thousand times? Truly, just as the asp stops its ears, so do these philosophers shut their eyes to the light of truth.

One of Galileo’s contemporaries, the Aristotelian philosopher Cesare Cremonini of the University of Padua, after hearing of Galileo’s claim to have seen mountains on the moon, refused to look at the moon through a telescope. Later sources quoted him as saying:

I do not wish to approve of claims about which I do not have any knowledge, and about things which I have not seen … and then to observe through those glasses gives me a headache. Enough! I do not want to hear anything more about this.

One can thus trace exactly how Galileo’s opponents, including prominent academics of his day, were able to maintain their opposition to his paradigm-changing views: by refusing to view the evidence. And rejecting his dangerous theories on that basis.

Although Stephen Goranson is nowhere remotely in the same league as the scholastics and intellectuals of Galileo’s day, he resorts to the same stratagem, staunchly refusing to read the books he arrogantly claims to refute. Evidently reading a book gives him the same headache Cremonini claimed he got from looking through a telescope. I suspect tracing an academic argument from evidence to conclusion (such as I carefully present in all my books and articles) would give him a splitting migraine.

He sees himself as a defender of scholastic orthodoxy and believes that truth is measured, not by evidence and argument, but by a show of hands.

Tell me, Stephen, exactly how that model applies to the time of Galileo.

Or do you believe the sun circles the earth, based on the majority opinion of those of Galileo’s day?

Recommended reading:
Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

[Secret Alias]

Neil, I don't miss someone who pretends that after 15 years of this theory no one in the field has bought into it. Like the effect a theory has is different that actually demonstrating it can be a working model for the origins of Judaism, Hebrew or anything else. Just think of the implications of this theory. Our understanding of Hebrew as a language mostly comes from the study of the Pentateuch. But wait! Now we know nothing about Hebrew before 270 BCE when it was allegedly used to render Greek writings into this barbarous tongue. Really? Is anyone going to turn upside down the entire study of Hebrew to accommodate people who want to make Jews and Judaism "barbarous" once again. Unlikely. But taking stupidity seriously isn't my thing.

[Secret Alias]

[like] contemporary responses to Galileo’s research in the early 1600s

And I guess your Galileo in this analogy.

[Secret Alias]

I am waiting for an Israeli scholar to develop the theory that the Greek philosophers didn't exist until the establishment of the library of Alexandria when Greek stole the books of Hebrews and other barbarous people to invent Plato, Aristotle and the like. There is no end to the writing of silly books.

[Secret Alias]

I've started a thread in another place in the forum to see what evidence there is for the Greek philosophers before 270 BCE. viewtopic.php?f=11&t=10542

[neilgodfrey]

Stephen Goranson’s approach to my research is highly reminiscent, in my opinion, of contemporary responses to Galileo’s research in the early 1600s.

It is impossible not to draw the comparison. Theologians, unfortunately, have inherited a privileged place in universities simply because of how universities originated. They have been left far behind other historians when it comes to approaches to historical inquiry.

What attracted me to certain writings of the "Copenhagen school" was that they uncompromisingly applied the same methods of historical inquiry to "biblical topics" as historians in "non-biblical" fields used. Those methods of the "secular" historians were clearly justifiable while the methods at the heart of the "biblical" historians were in general circular.

For a long time I hewed to the view that the Persian era was the most likely setting for the creation of the bulk of the OT literature and when I read Lemche's' attempts to point towards the Hellenistic era instead my instinctive reaction was: That's too extreme! Surely not!

But then other reading alerted me to the striking literary similarities between Herodotus's Histories and the Pentateuch, but even then I was imagining authors of the Pentateuch being exposed to Greek historiography in the Persian era.

I recall doubling down on doing as much in-depth and wide-ranging reading on the Documentary Hypothesis as I could.

What began to shake me into a critical approach there was the archaeological evidence cited -- and it soon became evident that archaeologists who embraced some sort of Documentary Hypothesis and origins of the biblical stories within the Iron Age "biblical" kingdoms of Israel and Judah were themselves sometimes adding theological or biblical narrative layers over the actual evidence they were identifying. They were attempting to force-fit the stones and clay artifacts into some version of the biblical narrative. They added layer upon layer of imaginative narrative that simply was not there in the archaeological finds.

Even in the recent conference that SG linked to, one of the keynote speakers spoke of local inhabitants in Jerusalem during the Persian era pining and longing for the day when the city and temple would all be rebuilt and Judah restored. Total fiction straight from the Psalms. No, I think it far more likely that they were preoccupied with getting good crops or other food, clothing and getting along with their neighbours and worrying about their children and fearing illness and attending markets and festivals and keeping their dwellings in reasonable condition.

I had to agree with one observation I read somewhere that if the Elephantine finds had been uncovered a few years earlier then Wellhausen' DH would scarcely ever have had the opportunity to fly.

There is no reason to gloss over the fact that the majority of Old Testament scholars of the present day will not readily accept new ideas like these concerning the date and ideological background of the Old Testament. A number of reasons may be found, not all of them based on the irrational, if understandable, disbelief and reluctance to accept what goes against the opinio communis of several generations of scholars. I hereby intend to say that exclamations like ‘This is nonsense!,’ ‘This cannot be true!’ or ‘This is impossible!’ are often heard, although the argument in favour of such ‘criticism’ will usually be of the circular kind: that is, it cannot be true, because it goes against the once generally accepted view, which is, in turn, based on the assumption that such things cannot be correct.

Lemche, Niels. “The Old Testament ‐a Hellenistic Book?” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 7 (January 1, 1993): 193

The current mainstream models of the origins of the biblical literature, I think, seem to appeal to some kind of "remarkable creativity" of the people of Israel and Judah. That is, to some sort of exceptional quality in their experiences or genius. There are certain religious and political-cultural forces at play here, I suspect.

The Hellenistic era origins demystify the process and everything coheres with common human experience -- and the literary and religious products of the Jews and Samaritans become the natural outgrowths of identifiable and understandable historical processes.

[ABuddhist]

Just think of the implications of this theory. Our understanding of Hebrew as a language mostly comes from the study of the Pentateuch. But wait! Now we know nothing about Hebrew before 270 BCE when it was allegedly used to render Greek writings into this barbarous tongue. Really? Is anyone going to turn upside down the entire study of Hebrew to accommodate people who want to make Jews and Judaism "barbarous" once again. Unlikely.

1. You are appealing to the consequences of accepting Gmirkin's model rather than refuting his model.

2. In fact, we would still have pre-Pentateuchal Hebrew, in the form of various inscriptions from Israel. But you keep ignoring such evidence.

[Secret Alias]

Is Gmirkin actually seriously suggesting this actually happened or is it just a appeal for notoriety? What evidence is there FOR the LXX being an original rather than a translation rather than just a denial of the understanding that 99.9999% (everyone but him) holds to be true? Are the names in the Pentateuch the original names of the places and characters in the Pentateuch narrative or translations? I don't think even Gmirkin believes this is history. Just an elaborate Vaihinger hypothesis. Here's another proof the Pentateuch isn't Jewish. You know who else never mentions "Jerusalem" once during their 10000+ page study of the Bible? Philo of Alexandria. Not once. What does that say? The leading exponent of the LXX doesn't treat the book as if it has anything to do with Judea or Jerusalem.