2017-03-15

Bruno Bauer’s “Christ and the Caesars” Review

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Biblical Studies
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On The Mythicism Files blog Quixie has posted a review of Bruno Bauer’s Christ and the Caesars:

ANTECEDENTS OF NT MINIMALISM: 
BAUER’S ‘CHRIST AND THE CAESARS’

It begins deliciously:

Bruno Bauer was for a brief time in the nineteenth century the enfant terrible of New Testament scholarship. He was a brilliant man who crossed paths and kept company with such notable contemporary Germans as Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. He became professor of theology in 1834—first in Berlin then later in Bonn—but by 1842 his radical rationalism provoked his academic superiors to revoke his teaching license. Insolent and defiant, he pissed off a lot of academics. He never regained a formal teaching post, but he continued to write books on New Testament criticism (and many other subjects)  that challenged the orthodox narrative, particularly its view of Christian origins. He became even more scandalous than Strauss or Schleimacher, who had already begun the process of demythologizing the New Testament before Bauer came along, of examining scripture from a literary perspective rather than a devotional one.
He published Christ and the Caesars in 1877.  This particular book is noteworthy as an influence on what would come to be known as the Dutch Radical school (Loman, Van Manen, Pierson, van den Bergh van Eysinga, et al). The Dutch Radicals mainly focused on the problems with the dating, provenance, and/or authenticity of the Pauline corpus, but they were (at least indirectly) the precursors of the mythicist scholarship of the early twentieth century (c.f. Drews).  Bauer may have been scandalous, but he was far from obscure in his day. He was notorious. He was so widely known that Albert Schweitzer even dedicated a whole chapter of his seminal Quest of the Historical Jesus to discussing his view of Bauer’s place on the continuum of scholarship, but Bauer’s work has been all but ignored and neglected ever since. 

 

 

2017-03-12

News stories like this leave me angry, despairing . . . .

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Politics & Society
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Perhaps it’s because I’ve visited Cambodia a few times and have enjoyed some memorable conversations with some wonderful ordinary people-in-the-streets/villages there. Also no doubt because I’ve visited their horror sites, the places where the Khmer Rouge butchered countless people. Or is it because I’ve seen the many orphanages, the many maimed with stories to tell of the Khmer Rouge, the Vietnamese, the US bombing. Or is it because of the so many young people proportionate to old — you know why if you have the slightest knowledge of their history. The poverty, matched only by the friendliness, and the anxiety about criminals furtively working behind the scenes to take advantage of the vulnerable, especially children. Or is it the day I saw that group of “ugly American” tourists loudly demanding discounts at heritage sites because these fat, wealthy white intruders whose government bombed much of their land to a moonscape felt that as “seniors” they were entitled to entry-fee discounts! (I doubt most Cambodians can ever expect to live as long as most Americans anyway, but that’s beside the point.) But for whatever reasons, news stories like this provoke feelings of disgust in my stomach. . . .

US attempt to recoup Cambodian debt ‘cack-handed’: former Australian Ambassador

At the time, Hun Sen said the money his country owed the US was incurred by the Lon Nol government that came to power in a 1970 coup backed by Washington, and that it was spent on arms used against the Cambodian people.

The official US line was that the loan had been for agricultural development and that Cambodia had the means to repay.

Hun Sen raised the issue again this year, with Cambodian media reporting the PM as saying the US had no right to demand repayment of a debt that was “blood-stained” from the brutal US bombing of Cambodian territory during the Vietnam War.

Former Australian ambassador to Cambodia Tony Kevin said American activity in the early 1970s had done great harm to Cambodia, and it was well understood in foreign policy circles that it had contributed to rise of the Khmer Rouge.

Lon Nol was toppled in 1975 by the ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge regime, under which an estimated 1.7 million people died in less than four years, plunging Cambodia into decades of poverty and political instability.

“At the same time the US was giving weapons to Lon Nol, it was bombing the Cambodian countryside into oblivion and creating millions of refugees fleeing into Phnom Penh and destroying all political fabric and civil life in the country,” Mr Kevin said.

“And all of this was simply to stop the supplies coming down to South Vietnam, as it was then, from the north.

“So the United States created a desert in Cambodia in those years, and Americans know this.”

. . . . . .”We all would have thought it inconceivable that the United States would be approaching Cambodia now in 2017, 50 years later, with such a bill,” he said.

A photo from that same news story that brought back powerful memories of my own:

My own recollection was of walking down a street that on one side for many hundreds of meters, perhaps even a few kilometres, were palatial mansions, high rises, exotic architecture, expensive cars in driveway; on the other side, dirt, faded grass planted with sticks and tin, torn canvasses and plastic for “homes” (shelters for sleeping at night), all the way along that same stretch of road: millionaires literally facing the beggars and destitute.

Of course the government protects corruption throughout society. That’s equally obvious to the casual visitor who cares to think for ten seconds about what he or she sees all around. (That’s most people, I’m sure, except for those “ugly Americans” and their ilk.)

And now Trump, and the demands for a paltry sum in the grand scheme of things.

What the hell is a white, western power doing over in this part of the planet in the first place, anyway?

 

2017-03-10

Latest On Neanderthals — Aspirin, and Kissing a “Modern Human”?

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Evolution, Science
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Speaking as we are on various types of humans in the evolutionary kaleidoscope here is a new Nature article on the latest research on Neanderthals — as read on ABC’s Science News:

Ancient dental plaque shows some Neanderthals ate plants and used drugs

Mushrooms were part of their diet, and meat eating (e.g. eating woolly rhinoceros) followed vegetarianism, just like pre-Flood vegetarianism of the human race and post-Flood meat-eating (kidding — about the biblical Flood myth).

But I’m amazed at what we can learn …..

What’s more, DNA analysis of the dental plaque from the El Sidrón Neanderthal teenager showed he ate plants to treat illness.

The teenager, who had a dental abscess on his jaw and evidence of microbes that cause gastro intestinal illnesses such as diarrhoea and vomiting, ate poplar bark, which contains the active ingredient in aspirin, and Penicillium, the mould that produces penicillin.

“So it is likely he would have been trying to self-medicate,” said Dr Weyrich.

And in the midst of reading about how our technologies are being used to record our personal information and accessed for spying, it seems even geneticists can snoop on the private activities of long extinct Neanderthals:

Swapping spit with humans

Neanderthals and ancient and modern humans also shared a number of microbes that can cause dental and gum diseases — although Neanderthals did not have cavities or gum disease.

The team sequenced the draft genome of one gum disease microbe, Methanovrevibacter oralis, from the 48,000 year-old El Sidrón cave teenager.

“What we find is that it looks like [the microbe] was introduced from humans about 120,000 years ago, about the same time that humans and Neanderthals started interbreeding,” Dr Weyrich said.

She said this indicated interactions between Neanderthals and humans were much more intimate than previously thought.

 

2017-03-07

G. A. Wells Obituary

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Biblical Scholars, Biblical Studies
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I was saddened to learn of the death of George Albert Wells via a Facebook friend. The Guardian has an obituary by Martin Jones. Wells’ books challenging the historicity of Jesus were among the first that I read on the question and I have never found their basic arguments overturned. Earl Doherty had quite a different view of the Jesus of earliest Christianity and I enjoyed reading some of the exchanges or criticisms of each other’s arguments that appeared online. In later years Wells did accept that the Q sayings of Jesus originated with some form of “historical Jesus” — but I found his arguments there less cogent than his earlier work.

He became a lecturer in German at UCL in 1949, and was appointed head of department at Birkbeck in 1968. He retired in 1988.

George’s views on the historicity of Jesus – which he first denied, then accepted in a qualified form – were controversial. He published nine books on this subject between 1971 and 2009, most notably The Historical Evidence for Jesus (1982). His work in this field generated debate in the US, where he was awarded the title of Humanist Laureate by the International Academy of Humanism in 1983.

Continue reading “G. A. Wells Obituary”

Destroyer of the Gods

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Biblical Scholars, Biblical Studies
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A steady stream of my RSS notices over recent weeks and months have alerted me to interest in a new book by Larry Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World. The title is dramatic enough. Search the term “destroyer of the gods” on Google’s Image search to see the dramatic scenarios it conjures. But the book is not about how Christianity “destroyed the gods” of ancient Rome (at least not directly) as the subtitle less dramatically warns.

Throughout my reading a question that kept bouncing ungrammatically around in the back of my head was, “Who is this book written for?” My conclusion is that it is written primarily for readers who will indeed find the main title, destroyer of the gods, personally exciting and rewarding. Had I been a Christian of the conservative or evangelical sort when I read it I would have been tickled pink to identify myself with a religion that had the power to overthrow the entire pantheon of ancient Rome. The tone of the book is consistent with this message of the title:

Christianity’s “constellation of devotional practices is quite simply remarkable, even astonishing.”

Paul makes an “astonishing move” in the way he reinterprets the Old Testament for his own day.

The earliest Christians did not simply come to believe that Jesus had been resurrected, but far more, Hurtado drives home to readers that they held “the startling conviction that God had raised Jesus from death”.

Christianity “both focused on Jesus and had a sense of distinctive group identity” “from an amazingly early time”.

Christianity grew “remarkably” in its first two hundred years.

“The story of early Christianity is a remarkable phenomenon. . .  It is simply the case that ‘no other cult in the Empire’ grew at anything like the same speed.”

Christianity grew “by power of persuasion, whether in preaching, intellectual argument, ‘miracles’ exhibiting the power of Jesus’ name, and simply the moral suasion of Christian behavior, including martyrdom.”

Christians “demonstrate the remarkable and admittedly unusual power of their own citizenship [of the kingdom of God”.

What was most “remarkable” in the Roman world was the Christian message that “there is one true and transcendent God . . . [who] loves the world/humanity” and actively sought the “redemption and reconciliation of individuals.”

The written outputs of Christians was also “remarkable” — “it is remarkable to have four extended accounts of Jesus’ ministry produced by as many authors and all within such a short period.” The commitment to produce the Christian writings required “strong commitment” and a “remarkable readiness” to do so.

The early Christian movement was identifiable and distinguishable particularly by the extraordinary reverence typically given . . . to Jesus along with God.

In discussing Christian worship practices in their Jewish context Hurtado uses the word “unique” near to two dozen times.

All of this emphasis on the “astonishing” and “remarkable” and “unique” is deliberate. Hurtado’s stated aim in writing the book is to shake readers from what he sees as their all too common complacency of taking so much about Christianity for granted and to appreciate how “astonishing”, “amazing”, “unique” and “remarkable” Christianity really was during its first three centuries of life. The message of the book is that early Christianity stood out like a bright shining light in the midst of a sea of benighted pagan religions and philosophical schools and primarily for this reason it was able to “destroy all other gods” and take over Western civilization.

Others will respond differently but the effort comes across to me as the strained efforts of an evangelist harnessing his scholarship for the service of preaching Christ. Just how strained, in my view, can be seen in his attempt to drive home “dramatic” implications of early Christianity’s exaltation of Jesus.  Continue reading “Destroyer of the Gods”

2017-03-06

Lost Tribes of Humanity

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Evolution, Science
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Brought myself up with the latest discoveries on human origins last night with BBC doco The Lost Tribes of Humanity. It told me that everything I had been taught about Neanderthals at school was wrong, and enlightened me on how to pronounce this other type of human I’ve come across in my reading from time to time, the Denosivans, introduced me to the term “hominin”, and backed my wife’s suspicion that I probably do carry around Neanderthal DNA in my genome.

From http://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v15/n3/abs/nrg3625.html

Neanderthals

  1. Neanderthals did leave artistic remains. The marks left on rocks were tested for various options such as side-products of cutting other things like skins on the rock surface and the eventual conclusion was that the marks were made as deliberate designs. (I learned they had no art.)
  2. Neanderthals adorned their bodies. Remains of certain bones indicate that wings were cut for feathers, not for meat. Feathers in abundance points to body decoration. (That was new.)
  3. Neanderthals buried their dead.
  4. They were not wiped out by the arrival of Homo Sapiens. The two types of human lived side by side for thousands of years, probably learning from one another.
  5. Modern humans interbred with Neanderthals. Most people of non-African origin have some Neanderthal DNA; about 1 to 2 percent on average of their DNA is Neanderthal. (I was taught the two could not interbreed.)
  6. The above fact indicates that modern humans interbred with Neanderthals very early in their trek out of Africa — probably when they first met Neanderthals in what today is the Middle East. This scenario would explain why modern humans across the globe contain Neanderthal DNA — with the exception of most Africans.
  7. Possibly up to 50% of all the Neanderthal DNA is still extant today, collectively, in modern humans. (We each contain around 1-2% of Neanderthal DNA but we don’t all contain the same DNA bits.)

Denisovans (D’nEESovins)

  • Races native to Australia and Papua New Guinea contain up to 5% of the Denisovan genome. Denisovan DNA is also found among the peoples of India, Himalayas and China. Up to 60 to 80% of Denisovan genome may be spread around in modern humans.

“The Hobbit” / Homo floresiensis

I was following the controversy surrounding these bones when they were first discovered in Indonesia and for a time was unsure if we would find we had a new type of human species or modern human inflicted with something like dwarfism. But the jury has apparently long been in by now and they definitely have been classified as a distinct variety of human.

Interestingly their small size was not the effect of being cut off on the island (animals so cut off tend to become smaller, presumably because less resources are therefore required to survive) but they were found to be small before their settlements were cut off by rising seas.

Though they have left remains indicating their human-ness their brains were the size of chimp brains. Sounds bad for a human, perhaps, but then as someone else pointed out recently on another program, we now know from our technological advances that it is not the size of a computer that matters so much as how it is organized. Even “bird-brains” can be very intelligent.

Archaic Africans

This group was new to me. We know of their past existence in Central Africa entirely from DNA samples among people of African descent — beginning in a laboratory in San Francisco of all places. They split off from the earliest human line then connected again some millennia later with the line leading to us.

So we don’t even need to dig up fossils to learn of the existence of other species or tribes of humans.

Interbreeding can have been through a range of activities, including adopting orphaned babies and raiding for mates.

My science fiction fantasy: Will we one day be able to piece together all the different bits of remaining DNA from Neanderthals and Denisovans and Archaic Africans and somehow put them together again the way Humpty was sort of reassembled — not literally in laboratories, god forbid, but on paper/digital files — and get some idea what those other branches of hominin were like compared with our pre-mongrel ancestors?

 

Well I never knew that was in the Bible

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Biblical Studies, Messiahs and messianism, Old Testament
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Circle of Juan de la Corte (1580 – 1663)
Title: The Burning of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar’s Army

Despite having been familiar with the Bible for many years I have had to confess that much of my understanding has been at a layman’s level and only sporadically informed by more thorough scholarly insights. One assumption that most lay readers are likely to bring to the Bible is that it speaks with a uniform voice about a future time when a Messiah figure descended from King David will once again restore Israel to a power exceeding the comparable status she held in the days of King Solomon.

So I was taken aback when I read that one of the contributors to the book of Isaiah had no such vision about a future Davidic messiah, but on the contrary accepted that David’s dynasty had finished, been terminated. But don’t we read in 2 Samuel 7 and Psalm 89 that God promised an everlasting dynasty for David? Did our Isaiah writer not know of this prophecy? How could that passage be included in the canon if it contradicted other “sacred scriptures”?

Part of the answer emerged when I recollected my earlier post, How Bible Contradictions Began. Notice what our author does to God’s eternal promises.

That second Isaiah was keen to reinterpret what he could of Isaiah’s oracles can be seen in his handling of the Davidic convenantal tradition. Though political realities would not allow him to simply repeat Isaiah’s promises to the Davidic monarchy, he skillfully actualizes this tradition by “democratizing” it, and applying the Davidic promises to the entire nation (55:1—5). (David Meade, Pseudonymity and Canon, 1986. p. 34)

Again 5 pages later,

We already saw how the Davidic promises were applied by second Isaiah to all Israel (55:1— 5).

If you’re confused by the above reference to “second Isaiah” then understand that scholars have long believed that the 66 chapters of our book of Isaiah are a composite of different writings: “first Isaiah” wrote chapters 1-39 during the time of the Assyrian empire; “second Isaiah” wrote the rest at the time of the Babylonian empire. Some even add a “third Isaiah” responsible for chapters 55-66.

The New Living Translation of the key passage: Isaiah 55:1-5 Continue reading “Well I never knew that was in the Bible”

2017-03-03

How God “Spoke” to the Prophets

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Biblical Studies, Old Testament
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I post here an interesting snippet from my recent reading where I learn at least one way God spoke and revealed messages to the prophets of old, or at least those who wrote in the names of prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah. When they wrote they could declare that their revelation was the word of God as God himself spoke to them, or even as God himself speaking. Yet scratch the surface and we find that what the author has done has in fact studied Scripture, thought about it, and reapplied it to his own or a future day, and then presented it as a new direct revelation from God.

In fact, not all of the prophetic revelation was derived from an oracular source. Not only did the prophets interpret their own encounter with the divine, they also demonstrate a mark of “inspired” reflection on the traditions they had received. C. Buchanan has demonstrated that even some oracles described as “visions” or the “coming of the word” are in fact the result of an “inspired” midrashic examination of earlier traditions. (Meade, David G. 1986. Pseudonymity and Canon: An Investigation into the Relationship of Authorship and Authority in Jewish and Earliest Christian Tradition. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids.)

Sadly I don’t have access to Buchanan’s article but fortunately David Meade tells us what passages Buchanan cites as evidence:

He cites 2 Isaiah’s midrash on Exodus 15:1-16 (cf. Isa 42:10-13; 43:14-17; 51:9-10) and Jeremiah’s midrash on Deut 28:26 (cf. Jer 7:32-33), Deut 28:64 (cf. Jer 9: 16), Deut 27:26; 4:20; 7:12 (cf. Jer 11.3-5), Deut 30:15 (cf. Jer 21:8), and Deut 4:9 (cf. Jer 29:13-14).

I set out those passages below to make it easier to see how this process of revelation works:

Continue reading “How God “Spoke” to the Prophets”

2017-03-01

Paul and Eschatalogical Morality

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by Tim Widowfield

Filed under: Biblical Scholars, Biblical Studies, Ethics & Human Nature, New Testament
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In a recent post (What a Bizarre Profession), Neil cited James McGrath over at The Pigeon Trough, discussing Paul’s admonition to the Romans not to resist the powers that be.

13:1 Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God.
13:2 Therefore whoever resists authority has opposed the ordinance of God; and they who have opposed will receive condemnation upon themselves.  (NASB)

English: The Apostle Paul
English: The Apostle Paul (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Naturally, McGrath mainly wished to take a few fizzling fusillades at mythicists, and that’s no surprise. What did surprise me was the number of respected scholars who actually take the scripture so seriously (if not literally), they feel obliged to tie themselves into rhetorical knots over whether and when to refuse to submit to governing authorities.

As Neil rightly said:

This human universal owes precious little to a few words written from a vaguely understood context and provenance in a civilization far removed from ours.

But even if he had written more clearly, and we fully understood the context of Romans 13, would we have any reason to consider Paul a trustworthy advocate for ethical behavior?

The question intrigues me, so I thought I’d compile a little list of reasons we might not want to trust Paul’s advice.

♦ Imminent Eschatology

Paul was clearly a believer in the imminent eschaton. He seems to have arrived at this belief by analyzing recent events, especially the resurrection, in light of scriptural reinterpretation. We might find his method somewhat odd, since he could have cited the teachings of his Christ instead. However, Paul either chose not to mention Jesus’ predictions concerning the coming of the Son of Man and the destruction of the Temple, or else he was unaware of them. Continue reading “Paul and Eschatalogical Morality”

The Problem of Forgery in the Bible: 10 Myths to Justify False Authorship

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Ancient Literature, Biblical Studies, New Testament
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Is it really a problem if a book in the Bible claims to be written by someone who was clearly not the author? Did ancient authors work by different rules and ideas about copyright from anything we think appropriate today? Might not a lowly scribe in fact be acting in a praiseworthy manner (by ancient standards) if he attached the name of a revered teacher as the author of a work he himself had just composed?

Scholars agree (not counting those “conservatives” or “fundamentalists” who believe every word in the bible, including author attribution, is true) that Paul’s letters to Timothy and Titus were not really written by Paul. So why do we read in those letters that Paul was their author? Was an unknown cleric so enamoured of Paul’s teaching, and so convinced that Paul would approve of everything in the letters, that he felt the best way he could honour the great Paul was to remove himself from the limelight and place Paul’s name on them?

Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the commandment of God our Saviour, and Lord Jesus Christ, which is our hope; unto Timothy, my own son in the faith (1 Tim 1:1 KJV)

Were the first readers of such letters well aware Paul was not the real author and that no attempt had been made to maliciously deceive anyone. Using names of great teachers was the custom, not a crime as it is today. Is that what they thought back then?

The justifications addressed above are still believed and repeated by many today.

But they are not true. I have posted before on forgery in the ancient world and with respect to the Bible:

Still, one of the books I am reading at the moment is Pseudonymity and Canon: An Investigation into the Relationship of Authorship and Authority in Jewish and Earliest Christian Tradition, an edited doctoral thesis by David G. Meade (1987), and very early in his book he addresses the same questions but from a different perspective. Meade’s interest is in the various ways the false names attached to biblical works have been justified by modern clerics and scholars. I counted ten different excuses moderns have concocted to justify or understand how it is that the Bible came to contain books with false author attributions.

–o0o–

Myth 1: Intellectual property was an alien idea to the ancients

A pre-critical attempt to resolve the tension, still found in isolation today, was to simply regard the writers of antiquity as unburdened with the “copyright” mentality of our modern era. The sheer bulk of pseudonymous writings was cited as proof that correct attribution was of little concern.

Myth 1 busted

This view has been decisively shattered by the work of W. Speyer9. He acknowledges that the vital element of our modern understanding of forgery is a sense of geistiges Eigentum or “intellectual/creative property”. This, he demonstrates, developed in Greek culture as early as the sixth century B.C. The rise of a book trade and the formation of large libraries in the Hellenistic era contributed to this development. By the Christian era, ancient critics had developed iterary tools for exposing forgeries not unsimilar to our techniques today. (p.4)

–o0o–

Myth 2: If intellectual property was of concern to Greeks it was an alien idea to Jews

A related attempt at appealing to a “pre-copyright” mentality is to restrict the phenomenon to oriental, and particularly, Jewish culture. . . . 

Myth 2 busted

However, by the Hellenistic era the concept was well established in Judaism. Even though an “Israelite literary tradition”, mostly characterized by anonymity, can be discerned12, the pervasiveness of Greek culture and the evidence of a consciousness of geistiges Eigentum in Jewish and Christian literature of the hellenistic era (cf.2 Thess 2:2; Rev 22:18-19) make this appeal untenable13

–o0o–

Myth 3: No one was deceived; it was an acceptable literary device

Another uncritical approach to the problem was to assert that pseudonymity was just a transparent literary fiction, not intended to deceive anyone. This idea found wide currency in the English speaking world, particularly through the works of H.H. Rowley (for apocalyptic) and P.N. Harrison (for the NT)14.

Myth 3 busted

Continue reading “The Problem of Forgery in the Bible: 10 Myths to Justify False Authorship”

2017-02-28

Freudian slip

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Biblical Scholars, Biblical Studies
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Chris Keith writes the following in his review of Anthony Le Donne’s new book, Near Christianity:

Despite my attempts, Le Donne continues to read Mark 15:35//Matt 27:46 as a divine abandonment and says, “Jesus also accused God of abandonment” (166).  I am not afraid of a Jesus who makes me uncomfortable, but I think there’s a better way to read that narrative that makes more sense of the full narrative.

The emphasis is mine. I thought, What a strange thing for a historian of to say! The thought betrays, I think, an unhealthy personal emotional investment in a certain view of Jesus. When an author appears to be coming out and boasting that they are prepared to break with a conventional theological view of their subject it suggests, to me at least, that the field is typically mired in agendas that are far removed from genuine and purely historical interests.

 

 

Wahhabism: The Ideology of Hate

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Religion and Atheism
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Ruba Ali Al-Hassani

An eloquent piece by Ruba Ali Al-Hassani published last year in The Huffington Post: Wahhabism: The Ideology of Hate. Ruba uses the myth of Islamic foundations (Muhammad did this and said that, etc) to justify some of her points on a “theological” basis, but that’s okay. I don’t mind too much people using myths for positive reasons. Anyway, a few excerpts. . . .

Wahhabism is an immense threat to any chance of peace in the Muslim and non-Muslim world. It is an ideology that openly advocates for violence against minorities and any majority-member Sunni who opposes it. It is an ideology that arose with violence since day one. It is an ideology that is misogynistic, sectarian, takfiri, and violent.

Wahhabism is an ideology that tells women they’re intellectually challenged and morons. . . . 

It is worth noting that Wahhabism not only tells women that they are sub-human, but that non-Arabs are especially sub-human. Wahhabism prevents Arab women from mingling with Arab men lest they “fall in sin”, yet they can be left alone with their male South-Asian drivers. This double standard is based on a racist idea that South-Asian men are not “men” & no Arab woman would be attracted to them and fall in sin. Continue reading “Wahhabism: The Ideology of Hate”

2017-02-24

The Dates of the Dead Sea Scrolls

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by Neil Godfrey

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As set out in a previous post, when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered they were dated on palaeographical (handwriting) analysis before the time of King Herod (37 to 4 BCE) or at least not later than the earlier years of Herod — before 20 BCE. We saw in the same post how the various scripts were subsequently recalibrated so that they brought the Dead Sea Scrolls into line with the Jewish Revolt of the late 60c CE. The handwriting styles of the Dead Sea Scrolls were aligned so that many of them were fresh and hidden in caves around 68 CE.

But how valid are the dates assigned on those palaeographic script charts? Not all scholars accept that recalibration as the final word.

 A first observation is that the small number of decades separating mid-first century CE from the time of Herod is barely greater than acknowledged  margin of error, but that is not the important point.

The important point is the circularity in which scribal hands of texts from Qumran’s caves were defined after 1951 as dated as late as the first century CE because those defining the palaeographic sequences believed Qumran scroll deposits at the time of the First Revolt had been firmly established archaeologically. No information in the years since has materially altered this epistemological circularity. Radiocarbon dates on Qumran texts that have been done until now have not altered this picture.

— Doudna, Gregory L. 2017. “Dating the Scroll Deposits of the Qumran Caves: A Question of Evidence” in The Caves of Qumran: Proceedings of the International Conference, Lugano 2014, edited by Marcello Fidanzio. Brill, Leiden, Boston. 

It was believed that a script belonged to the time of the Jewish revolt (66-70 CE).

Therefore the script was formally dated in the chart to the time of the Jewish revolt.

And the chart thereby became the standard for dating the scripts.

Here is how Frank Moore Cross chronologically aligned the different scripts of the Hebrew letter he, ה, referencing very early Aramaic texts, the Dead Sea Scrolls and later scripts.  Continue reading “The Dates of the Dead Sea Scrolls”

2017-02-23

On Not Reading the Bible Too Seriously — As Its Authors Intended

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by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Biblical Studies
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https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Beit_alfa02.jpg

My reflections on reading the story of Abraham setting out to sacrifice Isaac as a children’s story brought to mind a more mature understanding of the Bible’s narratives discussed by in The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and the Myth of Israel by Thomas L. Thompson. (The same book is published under the title The Bible in history : How Writers Create a Past, so don’t be fooled and buy both books like I did!)

Most Christians and Jews do read the story of the “Binding of Isaac” or Akedah as it’s more technically called correctly, though perhaps not always realising it. What I mean is that most readers do not really take it literally with all its psychological horror. Most readers, correctly at the story level and as the narrator evidently intended, admire Abraham for his faithfulness and obedience. The problem, the horror, descends only when we treat it as literal history and a genuine account of a real God, and give our minds over to that same God.

Here are some of Thomas L. Thompson’s more realistic explanation of the story. By realistic I mean reading it the way the narrator presented it and no more.

The first reference comes as a comparison with the story of Saul who fails God’s test by sparing the lives of the cattle after killing the enemy soldiers. Continue reading “On Not Reading the Bible Too Seriously — As Its Authors Intended”